Review of 2008

Well it's annual review time! This year is an odd one as we switched in March to fostering for Furry Friends to opening Starlight Trust Animal Rescue. I couldn't decide whether to record all together or separately. In the end I decided that the usual graph on the right records the STAR stuff so for the review I'd do everything. Then I got carried away and decided to put everything since we started fostering into tables. I do like my tables and stats I'm afraid!!!

So this is a complete record of our "intake" - this includes animals we have adopted, animals we fostered and animals we took is as STAR.



I can't quite believe that we have just taken in our 1000th animal! And nearly half of them were rats.

You can see on here this pattern we've had of one (or two) species dominating a year. In 05 it was rats, as we'd just started fostering and looked after several litters of babies.

In 06 you can see we took in a huge number of Russian Hamsters, far more than all the other years combined. This was a huge batch of mixed sex animals who were abandoned in a rescue, many of whom were pregnant. Rat numbers were also particularly high that year because of the "maskies" - who came from a family who didn't realise that boy rat plus girls rats equalled vast quantities of baby rats.

In 07 the big intakes were the Spiny Mice and Degus, both of which were rescued in large numbers from homes where animals had been left to breed out of control and were living in shocking conditions. And this year it was Fancy Mice from the same sort of situation. All in all these big rescues from one awful home seem to account for about a third of our annual intake :/ Where on earth, one has to wonder, are families and bodies such as social services in these situations? They tend to come from homes where the owner has a mental health issue so why does no-one step in earlier before it becomes such a huge issue?

So what happened to all these animals? I also did a table for all of the outcomes...



The animals are recorded by the year they came in on this table. Again it includes animals from all sources. It's odd how the number of animals who died is so consistent. These of course include our own pets so many are those who just reached the end of their days here as opposed to rescue animals who died before they could find a home. Still it shows why we get so emotionally exhausted sometimes with an average of about 2 friends a month leaving us for the bridge :(

It's lovely to think that we have now found new homes for 624 animals! I'm very proud of that figure. If you include the animals we released (wildlife being returned to the wild), passed to other rescues (this also refers to wildlife, 2 were passed elsewhere for release and 2 for permanent sanctuary) and passed back to Furry Friends for homing then that's 740 happy outcomes we've been involved in which is really pleasing.

It's a shame to see that 4 animals who arrived in 2007 are still waiting for a home :( That's Harry and Muchkin the two spiny mice who I'm beginning to think are going to end up spending their lives here, and Dre and Eminem the degus. Since their cagemate Smokey passed away I'm pondering having them neutered and adding them into our cage. I'm concerned about adding more girl goos into that cage since Naomi killed Fudge so perhaps neutered boys would be a safer introduction and ensure that we don't end up with too few in there. Reya and Kandi aren't spring chickens any more and I don't want them to get down to two cos then you risk a deep depression if one gets left alone.

Anyway 2008 was a quieter year for intake (until the mice came along) largely because homing was slow which meant we didn't have much room for new animals. Almost a third of the animals we took in during 08 are still here and the figures don't reflect those 2007 animals who didnt find a home into well into 08 as well.

Still, all in all I'm pretty pleased with our first year (ish) as STAR. Here's hoping for an even better 2009 :)