A fond farewell from JO

Hi Folks! By the time you will be reading this, I will have left my role as Shelter Manager. I’d been with the shelter for 28 years and last November decided to break away.

I’m going to miss all the wonderful staff, volunteers, and of course all the animals. I would just like to thank everyone for all their support over my career, especially the last 8 years as Shelter Manager. I couldn’t have done my job without this and the generosity of many who helped make things happen and animals well again.

Thank you to every one of you. I have made and will take away with me, the many friendships created through the love of animals. I have gone back to the family farm for a rest and to regroup after a long career with the shelter.

I wish everyone all the best for 2023 and I hope you will continue to support the charity as it seems to be needed more than ever at this time.

Bye folks - hopefully see you around.

Jo

I‘mdelighted to welcome you to the spring issue of Paws magazine, full of news, updates, and all the goings on from Little Valley Animal Shelter. Spring is definitely well on its way, and we are all really looking forward to the lighter evenings and longer, warmer days ahead.

As you will have read (on page 3) our former Shelter Manager Jo has now left the organisation after 28 years. We wish her all the very best for the future. Following Jo’s departure, her deputy, Anna also decided it was time to move on to pastures new. This left us with two very important positions to fill and I am very happy to welcome our brand new Shelter Manager Emily Mayer to Little Valley. We also give a warm welcome to Merryn Walker who is our new Deputy and Outreach Manager. Both have a wealth of experience in animal care and have relocated to Devon to embrace their new roles.

In the last issue of Paws magazine, I spoke about the many exciting projects we have been working on, and our plans for a number of improvements to Little Valley. Our plans for 2023 are ambitious, but also critical to our existence if we want to move with the changing landscape. As the charity grows and we offer more to the Devon community, we need to ensure that our infrastructure grows to cope with rising demand. We need enough staff to provide care for the increasing numbers of animals being abandoned, and enough space at the shelter to house them comfortably while they wait for their forever homes.

A good example of how we are making improvements is our Big Rabbitry Rebuild project (you can read more about this on page 10). This project will see our current rabbit housing facilities re-imagined and rebuilt to provide a greater level of accommodation for our bunnies, and also make bonding easier. It will also provide a more welcoming space for the public to come and view our rabbits for rehoming. The project will be overseen by Emily with input from our small animal team. This represents the last of our animal housing areas to get a major upgrade after we rebuilt our cattery in 2013 and our kennels in 2020.

As well as the new rabbitry, we are excited to start work on our Community Outreach Project. This will be headed up by Merryn and we are keen to begin a soft launch this spring. Please keep an eye on our website and social media channels to find out if we will be coming to an area near you.

In more staff news, I am delighted to welcome Anoushka Baker to the team as our new Community Fundraiser and Events Coordinator. This signals our commitment to getting back out into the community and hosting events again following the pandemic. One of the events we have planned is the return of our big summer fayre and fun dog show on Sunday 2nd July. This will be my first experience of a summer fayre at Little Valley since I joined in 2019 so I am very much looking forward to this event. More news on this to come, but make sure you save the date! A date that is very much stuck in my mind, is Sunday the 7th of May. Not only is this my wedding anniversary, but I have also been talked into doing a 15,000 foot skydive! I am comforted to know that I won’t be doing it on my own; this is an event that three of our Animal Care Assistants are taking part in as well as our Shelter Manager, and our Communications Manager. We have also teamed up with RSPCA Cornwall Branch and RSPCA Bristol A.R.C. for a joint South West skydive and wingwalk event at Dunkeswell airfield. We are all doing something extreme to raise money for our individual branches and hopefully inspire others to do the same.

We are proud to be a local charity, supported almost entirely by our wonderful community all across Devon, from Brixham to Bideford and Tavistock to Tiverton. For this reason we have decided to attend the Devon County Show this year which will give us a chance to engage with thousands of people and other Devon organisations to grow our community and garner corporate support from local businesses.

Lastly, I want to express my sincere thanks to Barratt David Wilson Homes, Exeter, BT Exeter and Arque Construction Limited for their kind and generous volunteer teams who will be coming in to the shelter to work on a number of projects over the spring. These companies have donated time, materials and expertise into updating, refreshing and repairing a number of areas at the shelter. I also want to thank Gideon Bright at Dryrobe who kindly donated a dozen dryrobes to our animal care team to keep them warm and dry in all weathers (see page 14). It’s acts of kindness like this that remind us how important community is, and that we can accomplish so much more when we work together.

HUGH LOWSON Chief Executive Officer

New Year, new new life, new beginnings! We welcome our new Shelter Manager, Emily Mayer, to Little Valley!

skydive alongside five other brave colleagues. This will be on the 7th of May and I hope to raise lots of sponsorship money for the charity. Well, I did say I want to see more of Devon, and I’m told you can see pretty much all of it at once from that high up!

Since starting my role at Little Valley in February, I have been warmly welcomed by all the staff, and I have been lucky enough to meet some of our volunteers and supporters too. I am looking forward to getting to know our community very soon and I have many plans to do that over the next few months. For the time being, I am getting stuck into finding out how the shelter runs, and implementing a number of positive changes, which are already starting to make a big difference.

Hellodear readers! My name is Emily and I am delighted to have joined the wonderful team here at RSPCA Little Valley Animal Shelter. It’s rather exciting to be writing, what I hope is the first of many positive and uplifting reports from the shelter.

I guess I should give you a little bit of background on me? I relocated from RSPCA Isle of Thanet Branch in Kent, where I was a Shelter Manager for a number of years. I have experience as a vet nurse and a degree in animal science. Moving to Devon with my family was a big decision for all of us, but we were ready for a new challenge and Devon is such a beautiful county to live in. We can’t wait to go exploring its many beaches, woodlands and attractions. We also brought two cats and a rabbit on this adventure with us. To show my commitment to this team, I have also agreed to do a 15,000ft

It has been really good to see lots of animals start to leave the shelter and go to their new forever homes. Cats seem to do very well here at Little Valley, but dogs and rabbits tend to take a little longer to find their perfect match. I will be working on how we can address this as a priority.

We have had many animals signed over to us because people simply can’t afford to keep them as the cost of living crisis continues to affect us all. Sometimes it is simply a case of not being able to afford to feed their animals, who are very much loved. For this reason, I will be trialling a community animal food bank here at the shelter, to offer food and support to those people that need some assistance with their dogs and cats. Thanks to our generous supporters, we have surplus food which has been donated to the shelter but can’t be used for some of our animals. So it makes sense to distribute this food to those in need, so that they can continue to keep their animals, rather than have to sign them over to us as a last resort. If successful, this could become something we offer regularly.

Of course, I am not the only newbie here at Little Valley. We have some new staff joining our team and look forward to the opportunities this will bring. Our new Deputy and Outreach Manager Merryn Walker started in March as well as another Animal Care Assistant called Jodie. This will mean we have the capacity to cope with the growing demand of animals being signed over to our care.

I have also been busy planning our rabbitry rebuild with the help of the small animal team. This is something I am very passionate about and we have some innovative ideas on how to make our rabbitry really special. I can’t wait to update you on this as the project gets underway later this year.

Little Valley has also been nominated for the Animal Charity Team of the Year award by Petplan insurance. We find out if we made the short-list later this year. As well as this, we also won £1,000 from Petplan’s annual advent calendar promotion on social media over Christmas, thanks to the many people who tagged us in their post.

Of course, we also rely on the kindness of volunteers, both here at the shelter and in our shops. We will be holding a volunteer open day where people can come to the shelter, have a look around, meet the staff and some of our animals, and find out what opportunities we have for volunteers. I would like to thank all those who have submitted fostering or adoption forms for animals looking for homes, and everyone who has donated to our urgent fundraising appeals. It’s fantastic to see so much support for this much loved local charity.

I am truly excited about leading Little Valley into its next phase and our plans for 2023 are well underway. I am keen to get some events happening here and we start with a Shelter Open Afternoon on Sunday 28th May. Please do come along for a cup of tea and some cake, I would love to meet you!

I hope this update has been a good one? I have been very busy running the shelter, but I will have plenty more to talk about in our next newsletter. Watch this space!

MAYER Shelter Manager