Speech by Minister Desmond Lee at the SPCA's 75th Anniversary Gala Dinner on 15 Oct

Oct 15, 2022

A very good evening to everybody. I am delighted to join you today on this special occasion, to commemorate the SPCA’s 75th anniversary.

SPCA’s Contributions to Animal Welfare

Since it was established in 1947, the SPCA has played an important role in advancing animal health and welfare standards in Singapore. Each year, your team of colleagues and volunteers work tirelessly behind the scenes to help more than 2,000 animals through your emergency rescue services, animal shelter, and Community Animal Clinic. This year alone, you helped find homes for more than 800 animals – we call them forever homes, I hope that to be so.

I am also grateful that SPCA has been going the extra mile to care for our community animals. Back in 2019, I had the privilege to visit your Community Animal Clinic, which is a not-for-profit clinic that treats rescued animals and community animals. Since its opening, consultations have steadily increased, with over 11,000 appointments since last July – the numbers have been going up, year-on-year.

More recently, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the SPCA swung into action, raising funds to provide pet food to community animal caregivers, so that the animals would continue to be fed. You have helped to feed more than 1,800 community animals since 2020, and your hard work has made a positive difference to the welfare of these animals.

I hear that you will be going even further, and will be launching a corporate wellness programme next year. Under this programme, the SPCA will bring some of your community animals that are up for adoption to different workplaces, where employees can interact with them. These sessions will be mutually beneficial. They can help to socialise the community animals, while at the same time enhancing the mental wellbeing of people in workplaces. The SPCA also plans to run corporate volunteering sessions, and to hold wellness programmes at its cattery. I encourage corporate partners to support these initiatives when they are launched next year.

Partnership Between SPCA and AVS

I am also deeply grateful for the SPCA’s close partnership over the years. Through the Animal & Veterinary Service (AVS), we have been working closely with animal welfare groups to raise standards for animal welfare in Singapore.

The SPCA has been a strong and staunch supporter of these efforts.  In fact, you are a lead partner for several of our initiatives, such as the Trap-Neuter-Rehome/Release-Manage, or TNRM, programme. In fact, in 2014, SPCA joined us, along with a number of animal welfare groups, we went to Australia to visit different organisations, animal welfare groups, and the RSCPA. It was in the back of the bus as we were driving towards the RSPCA that we worked together –, to sketch out the initial idea for a Trap-Neuter-Release-Manage, or TNRM, programme. Back then, the approach was vastly different from the approach that we have today. A couple of years later, in 2018, indeed, with the very strong support of the SPCA and many other animal welfare groups, we were able to change the way in which we manage community dogs in peri-urban places. What we did was to work with animal welfare groups, take different zones of Singapore, bring in experts from abroad that would supplement our own team, to train our volunteers, who would then trap the dogs, have them neutered at SPCA and other clinics, and then either rehomed, sheltered or released back into the community. We launched this programme for free-roaming dogs in 2018. Since then, we have brought 3,500 dogs into this programme, and more than 60% of them have been rehomed or fostered. This would not have been possible without the hard work and contributions of the SPCA and our animal welfare group partners.

You are also a key partner for our Project for ADOption and REhoming, or Project ADORE. We started Project ADORE in 2012, to allow mixed-breed dogs, or Singapore Specials, to be adopted by people living in our HDB estates. Ten years on, we have successfully rehomed over 2,100 dogs under Project ADORE, again with the support of the SPCA and our other AWGs. In fact, we also rehome military and police dogs – when they retired, we allowed them to be rehomed. Earlier this year, we formalised the expanded adoption criteria, to allow larger-sized mixed-breed dogs to be rehomed in our HDB homes. We hope this will help more free-roaming dogs, our Singapore Specials, find loving homes.

To further support the rehoming of Singapore Specials, AVS opened the Centre for Animal Rehabilitation six months ago. This is Singapore’s first dedicated facility for the behavioural rehabilitation of domestic animals. There are some Singapore Specials that are rescued, but because of their temperament, because of the trauma that they’ve been through, a number of them can never be rehomed nor released. The animal welfare groups just feel an obligation to shelter them for the rest of their lives but feel that is not the best solution for them – so we hope this Centre can make a difference. It aims to help free-roaming dogs transition to their future life as pets, through a comprehensive training programme. Our training programmes are grounded in science-based methods, and we conduct them in a low-stress and home-like environment. I am glad to hear that the first four dogs which have completed their rehabilitation with AVS are now up for adoption, through a pilot collaboration with the SPCA. We are rooting for these furry friends – Rocky, Rachel, Kirin, and Bourbon – and we hope to hear good news about their adoption soon. That would cheer the team at the Centre, and encourage us to continue rehabilitating dogs which would otherwise be deemed too difficult to rehome.

Beyond these joint efforts, we also regularly seek the views of animal welfare groups, including the SPCA, as we continue to review and refine our approaches with regards to animals. Recently, we consulted you on our proposed cat management framework, including a proposal to extend the TNRM programme to community cats. This will help us manage the community cat population in a more holistic, coordinated, humane, and science-based manner.

We also sought your views on our proposal to expand the licensing and microchipping scheme for pet dogs, to include pet cats, and the possibility of regularising the keeping of pet cats in HDB homes. This will improve the traceability of pet cats, and help us respond more effectively to animal disease outbreaks. It will also enable us to hold irresponsible cat owners to account if their cats are found to be neglected, abused, or abandoned.

We will carefully consider your views, along with the feedback from the ongoing public consultation, as we refine our framework.

On this note, we appreciate that the SPCA has helped us to publicise our survey on the proposed cat management framework. I am glad to share that we have received almost 30,000 responses so far. We launched the survey in September, and it will be open until the 2nd of November. I encourage you to help us spread the word, share your views through our survey, if you haven’t done so because there are lots of details of different aspects of cat management – in the home, in the community, working with stray feeders, and so on. Your feedback is important to us, as we work together to improve our policies for cat management and welfare. We look forward to sharing the findings of the public consultation exercise, and our revised recommendations, later next year.

Conclusion

In closing, I would like to thank you, thank all colleagues at the SPCA, for your commitment, dedication and contributions to animal welfare over the past 75 years, and for being an important and valued partner to the AVS. I would like to thank your passionate team of colleagues and volunteers and vets, and everyone else who has played a part in the SPCA’s success. And we look forward to seeing the SPCA go from strength to strength in the years ahead.

On that note, thank you and I wish all of you an enjoyable evening ahead.