RSPCA Assured

It is not much more than a week ago that I posted about this:

Chris Packham and the RSPCA – Animal Wild

Now George Monbiot has reacted and his voice is, as ever, worth listening to. How is it, he wonders, that an organisation has come to stand for the precise opposite of what it was founded for – the prevention of cruelty to animals. I think I may have been too easy on them in the past, but I have been highly critical of their farm labelling scheme. Monbiot goes much further. The presence of an RSPCA label on meat or fish should mean that the animal was farmed to “high welfare” standards. But this includes massive factory farms, and when Animal Rising carried out 60 investigations on 45 farms, they found 280 legal breaches. That is to say standards did not even meet the bare legal minimums, let alone those prescribed by the RSPCA. The footage is horrendous, unwatchable.

When abuse of this order is discovered against household pets, the RSPCA takes action. In some cases, says Monbiot, individuals may have mental health issues or simply be unable to cope. But when abuse is on an industrial scale, for profit, it does nothing at all.

Rather than trumpeting their new royal patron and 200th anniversary, they might concentrate on why they are promoting and reinforcing these double standards and simply do away with this terrible, dishonest scheme. If not, what is the organisation for?

The RSPCA’s website until recently carried 159 cooking recipes, recently deleted. How many were plant-based? Precisely four.

They reply: ““If we stepped back from RSPCA Assured, we risk leaving millions of farmed animals with even less protection.”  That, says Monbiot, is the opposite of the truth. Animal Rising describes the Assured scheme as “a marketing arm of the intensive animal agriculture industry”. Monbiot replies: “The RSPCA’s advertisements show animals leading blissful outdoor lives, while being cuddled and petted by the farmer [the cartoon video to which he refers is a hypocritical, meaningless, lying disgrace]. It invites primary schoolchildren to thank a farmer for raising pigs for slaughter. What is this, if not promoting the meat industry? I see the RSPCA as normalising and legitimising animal suffering on an industrial scale.”

The RSPCA does note even make very much money from the scheme. It is a strange appeasement which makes no sense. Why are they so terrified of the vested interests? Monbiot goes further than Chris Packham (he is the RPSCA’s president after all). It is not just the scheme that should go: “So extreme and outrageous are the RSPCA’s failures that I suspect animals would be better off without it.”