SO LET’S FILL OUT THE STORY A LITTLE….
Glynne Sutcliffe was charged by the RSPCA with neglect in 2000. The story of the treatment she and her dying 16 year old dog received horrified so many that MP Ann Bressington took it to the South Australian Parliament in 2007. You can read the full transcript of her speech here: PREVENTION OF CRUELTY TO ANIMALS AMENDMENT BILL 2007
Glynne Sutcliffe - Let me start over from the beginning....
I have been running an RSPCA watch for over a decade.
And I have recorded the destruction of many lives.
If you consider absolute numbers, there are hundreds of thousands of animals they have killed (most of whom were treacherously ‘put down’ in their so-called ‘shelters’).
But they have also effectively destroyed the lives of thousands of human beings.
I haven’t come across a single one of these thousands of people run down by the RSPCA juggernaut who could be described as cruel or sadistic.
Surely it is to protect animals from human cruelty that Animal Welfare legislation is supposedly directed. Moreover this is part of the RSPCA’s actual chosen name – they set themselves up as a ‘society’, we are informed, for the explicit purpose of preventing cruelty to animals.
Yet we find them consistently raiding, stealing from and then prosecuting, people who have loved and cared for animals far better than the RSPCA, charged not with cruelty as such, but with neglect – a usefully flexible accusation that can be applied over a wide range of situations according to the RSPCA’s definition of ‘need’ – tailored to suit getting their pre-chosen victims.
In stark contrast, where there is real cruelty to animals, not only when it is of a sadistic or individual nature, but also when it is fully institutionalised, as in factory farming, the RSPCA has either played the three monkeys game – they will hear no evil, see no evil, and speak no evil of the perpetrators – or else they will, if the evidence is undeniable, utter loud condemnations without any follow-up action at all, either practical or legal.
Of those thousands they have selected for prosecution, a huge and disproportionate fraction are older people – most, in fact, over sixty.
Of the total number of older people they have run through this charade of proper procedure in the legal system, we observe a statistically significant over-representation of disabled people.
And of that same total number, most have been women.
The RSPCA’s chosen weapon of destruction is the Parliament-provided Animal Welfare Act - which they helped draft.
The RSPCA’s chosen killing fields for people are the law courts.
The RSPCA’s primary motive appears to be economic, namely the transfer of assets and resources from the possession of the prior owners into the bank coffers of the RSPCA HQ, after their privately retained prosecuting lawyers, supportive vets and other hangers-on have been paid out.
The secondary motive is power accumulation. The RSPCA has enormous sheer clout, able to dictate terms in almost all circumstances in which they are interested. (Beware their interest in ‘domestic violence’ and ‘hoarding’ – both being real problems that the RSPCA seeks to use for domain expansion of their power base)
The courts provide a public gloss of formal propriety, and this is supported with the RSPCA staged and supported ‘public’ (media-based) display of outrage and indignation. This effectively disguises what is in actuality a form of extortion.
Because of the way they have gamed the legal system with draconian penalties, a highly massaged and inflamed public opinion concerning cruelty to animals, and the way fear can induce innocent people to ‘admit guilt’ in the plea bargain process, the RSPCA are virtually unassailable.
They repeat their slogans ad nauseam, and no amount of contrary opinion, argument or data can budge them from their roller-coaster careening through the lives and property of ordinary people, albeit preferably single and female people.
I have gathered a great deal of information about their activities, as well as other people’s efforts to analyse and explain what is going on, and the astonishingly low level of effective resistance, which is in effect confined almost to making faces at them, or shrieking abuse. - all of which, of course, runs off them like the proverbial water off a duck’s back. To fight back effectively one needs both knowledge and action.
So I have, as I said, collected a considerable amount of information about all of this.
The material I have collected is ready to be created as a book.
But if that book is to be produced, first I need to survive.
I suppose it is not surprising that I am not the RSPCA’s pin-up girl of the month. They certainly wouldn’t appoint me as their media liaison person. For a start I am over sixty, and they carefully choose young glamour girls for media liaison work. But then there is the small fact that I have been adding unflattering and critical comments to their media releases (normally published uncritically and verbatim by lap-dog editors).
So I shouldn’t be surprised that they came gunning for me. After all I was silly enough to have cats on my property. In hindsight it was only a matter of time before they ran me into the ground.
I was surprised, however, at how far they were prepared to indulge their taste for revenge. A rather dramatic highlight was finding myself hand-cuffed, and in an ambulance being taken back to the local hospital, with the wires of the cardiac monitor that had been fitted earlier that morning hanging out of my shirt front, with the police officer fully informed on what these wires were and why they were there.
His adrenalin levels were possibly affecting his intelligence. This was the officer that had a short time before kicked in my front door with his boot, unwilling to wait till I had finished a short phone call to the magistrate at the local court-house, trying to find out what possible justification existed for the raid.
In any case, I need a very good lawyer right now, fast. Alas, I have no available cash with which to buy a lawyer’s services.
I need a strong advocate, not one vulnerable to any kind of pressure or bribe, implicit or explicit, that the RSPCA might come up with.
Without a lawyer there is no hope. With a lawyer, the only hope is to have one strong-minded enough to speak to the truth, rather than speak to the script.
For the RSPCA does have this script for prosecutions. They play the plea bargain game hard. The single over-riding goal is to get a conviction. The easiest first step is to get an “admission of guilt” from the selected sacrificial victim.
Considerations of actual guilt or innocence are not relevant. By operating within the demographic sector of the elderly, the RSPCA is predominantly focussing on the “asset rich, cash poor” folk, who generally can’t afford a lawyer, or if they can, still want desperately to get out of the scene as rapidly and as cheaply as possible.
The problem is that the asset targeted for appropriation through use of the courts is normally the home of the person under attack. So the RSPCA action regularly throws people out of their homes, bankrupt and destitute. Many then just die. It is convenient that they are old enough for this not to raise eyebrows – or any concern at all really. It is just taken as one of those facts of nature that older people often die.
Since the RSPCA often chooses to pounce when they are informed that a target person is experiencing difficulties – either illness or job loss or marriage breakup, or anything - in my case it was reaching my borrowing cap on the line of credit that I set up in 2004 - that is likely to throw them off balance and less able to run a competent legal defence, they again increase their chances of getting an easy conviction.
Well, anyway, there is more that could be said, but I’ve said enough both to describe my own situation and allow you to be better informed than if you had to rely solely on the mainsteam media.
I do need your support and help. And our society needs to be rid of the RSPCA. Stand with me on this and we’ll make the world a better place.