“We want to break the ‘I buy an animal so it’s my thing'”, pleads the president of the SPA

“Nobody knows” how many animals are abandoned each year in France, admits Jacques-Charles Fombonne, president of the Society for the Protection of Animals (SPA). Each year, thousands of animals find themselves without families, abandoned on the side of the road and which the SPA recovers in its 63 shelters. Jacques-Charles Fombonne wants to put an end to fashions and consumerist logic. He calls to “responsible adoption”.

franceinfo: How many animals are abandoned each year in France?

Jacques-Charles Fombonne: Nobody knows. I have been campaigning for years with successive ministers to have an observatory on animal abuse. We are at the end of the chain. Like emergency physicians, we try to cure the disease without having made the diagnosis. We know that going on vacation, with the constraint represented by the animals, encourages abandonment. Ditto for impulse buying. We think about it, but too late, we realize that it’s expensive, that you have to go out after football in the evening to go for a walk. But fundamentally, we do not know what are the springs that could prevent it, what are the environments, urban, rural or classes, senior managers, middle managers, employees, etc. who abandon their animals the most. We don’t know at all, even though it would allow us to have preventive actions that would be incredibly more targeted than those we do.

How many animals do you collect each year?

44,000 animals were collected by the SPA in 2022, an average of 3,500 abandoned animals each month. We double during the summer, that is to say that instead of having 7,000 animals in two months, we have almost 15,000. What is special since the beginning of the year is that we haven’t made any empty spaces. Usually, we have a hollow, that is to say that we have few arrivals and a lot of adoptions. But here, we’ve been shooting for a year and a half with 6,000-6,500 animals present in the shelters practically all year round. For example, over the first four months, we had 15,000 abandonments and just over 14,000 adoptions. Which means that it increases little by little to the point that we are at 80% saturation before the summer. However, the 63 shelters of the SPA are able to accommodate 7,000-7,500 animals. We have two thirds of cats, one third of dogs so we manage to juggle by putting the cats in smaller spaces.

Are cats still the most abandoned animals?

There is a huge litter of cats. It’s not abandonment in the social sense of the term, but for four or five years, we really have a lot of kittens. Is this related to global warming? Females are fertile earlier and earlier in the season. Before, it was more March-April. Now it’s the end of February.

What to do when you want to adopt?

To adopt an animal, before going to the shelter, you can discover on the association’s website, the animals offered for adoption with an information sheet on its characteristics, character and needs. You can find via the search engine either the animals available at the shelter closest to you, or by the breed of the animal you are looking for. There are rarely any litters of puppies in the wild. The dogs to be adopted are adults, it is easy to give indications on their appearance and to draw up a behavior sheet, if they like children, the company of other animals, if they are fearful, etc. For kittens, it’s a little more complicated in the sense that they are adopted quite quickly, even before having had time to make a card revealing their character.

Why is there no SPA app? Two years ago, the GetPet application developed in Lithuania, a kind of Tinder for dogs, had nevertheless had good press in Europe. The SPA is almost completely absent from social networks.

We launched a redesign of its site two years ago, so that it is readable on smartphones. We had at one point considered the creation of an app. We had several thoughts: the first was that no one asked us, our audience seemed to be satisfied with the information they found on the site; and then, an app is a double update, you have to, in addition to the site, bring it to life, feed it, update it. And it’s a full-time job. As long as no one asks us, it does not justify the expense. We never get feedback telling us: ” Your site is crap, it’s useless, an app would be much better“. In which case, obviously, we would have wondered about the feasibility of the thing. We have an audience that is not necessarily very young.

For its 2023 campaign against abandonment, the Humane Society favored the absurd through a film that begins in 873 AD to promote responsible adoption.

Some prospective adopters find your conditions too demanding. Do you really put constraints on the level of the place of life and the standard of living?

We put quite real conditions in the adoption of an animal. Farmers do the same. We are in a logic of animal protection so we give animals to people whom we want to ensure that they will be able to take care of them as well as possible. We want to break the link between ” I buy, so it’s my thing, I do what I want with it“. It’s nice to play with an animal, it’s friendlier than a stuffed dog, but we don’t get out of a consumerist logic. We absolutely want to get out of it, that’s what we calls responsible adoption. There’s information about the money so people aren’t horribly caught off guard six months later when they get attached to the animal and find that they can’t take care of it. An animal is 100-150 euros a month now, with the increase in prices. If you have the minimum wage, I don’t know where you find the 150 euros. This n It’s not doing people a favor not to ask them the question. It’s something that I absolutely support.

“It’s not about humiliating people. We avoid giving animals that unfortunately suffer from a fashion effect to people who we know full well from the start that they will not be able to take good care of them well and who will abandon him a second time.

Charles Fombonne, President of the SPA

at franceinfo

We are not dog or cat dealers. A gentleman wrote to me saying that he had been told he was too old to adopt a dog. Of course, it’s not easy to hear. But you take a puppy when you’re 65-70 years old and you’re in great shape, when the dog is seven-eight years old, you won’t necessarily be able to take care of it if it’s a Malinois, if it’s is a German shepherd, if it’s a greyhound, if it’s a dog that needs to run and exercise. Same thing if you live in an apartment and you leave at six o’clock and come back in the evening. There is real logic. I’m willing to admit that diplomacy isn’t necessarily part of the agent training package, but it’s always going very well. We also do adoption visits. Often it is people who ask us for them. We will see how our animals are treated, even if they have legally become the property of people. But we don’t land like the GIGN at six o’clock in the morning. We make an appointment, we are polite and we are in a logic of pedagogy.

You say: “We are not going to let someone take an animal because he leaves the apartment at 6 a.m. and comes back in the evening”. But this is the case, of almost everyone who works…

We are not going to give them a Malinois, a German Shepherd or an Australian Shepherd. It’s not a question of size, but of behavior. You have dogs that are just about able to live on their own and others that cannot.

“You have a Tervueren shepherd for example. If you leave him alone, first he will start destroying the apartment because he is bored, because he is anxious. He will bark all day, he will pee everywhere. It will immediately make the living conditions unbearable.”

Jacques-Charles Fombonne

at franceinfo

You are going to come home the first evening, you are going to have the neighbors on the landing, he will have eaten the sofa, everything that will have fallen within his reach. It will last three weeks and we will bring it back to us. So we say no because we know that it is an announced disaster. There is still a small determinism of the breed, even if the dogs are different individuals. We have dogs with special needs. They are not psychopathic dogs, but they require either special living conditions or masters who already have experience, who leave nothing out in terms of obedience: the dog is not going to climb on the sofa, he will be educated the way a dog should be educated because we know that these are dogs that need to be held. We are here to save animals. This is our mission. We have very few returns in the end, less than 4% for all animals combined. Last year, 41,000 animals were adopted. I’ve seen people come and adopt a big dog and leave with a little cat and write to us three weeks later saying, “What happiness! I did well to listen to you“.

What do you say to someone who is ready to foster an animal?

First of all thank you because, when we go to adopt an animal in a shelter whatever it is, at home or elsewhere, we save two of them, the one we are leaving with and the one we are going to get out of the pound to take its place. And then, we’re going to help them ask themselves the right questions: do I have the money? If so, could I take care of it physically? Veterinary fees cost a fortune. We take care of the animals of people who are on social minima free of charge in our dispensaries. We have 12 and no one knows. There is one in Paris, rue Mallarmé in the 17th, in Toulon, in Marseille, in Canet, in Perpignan, almost everywhere… We treat by appointment. We also give individual aid to people who contact us. You’re a student, you don’t have a lot of money, you have a dog that needs an expensive operation, we’ll pay for part of it. We also help other associations that ask us for it. Last year, we gave more than 250,000 euros to associations. We also work with town halls. We pay for mass sterilizations on cats, for example. This year, there are 232 agreements with town halls. The operation of a medium-sized shelter costs 500,000 euros per year. We have 750 employees.

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What should be improved at the level of the refuges?

For three years, we have been thinking about a new concept. We took it out on paper and we are going to apply it in part to our refuge in Gennevilliers where we started the work, near Millau, Charleville-Mézières and Lyon too. It is a system where the animals will be free. They will take shelter in their niche when they are tired, unlike what is currently happening where they are in the box, and from which they only come out to go for a walk one to three hours a day. When I arrived at the SPA, I was struck to see dogs behind railings expressing pleasure in seeing humans pass barking. It doesn’t make you want to take them. And they ain’t right, they start to stereotype [ ensemble d’attitudes, de gestes, d’actes ou de paroles sans signification apparente reproduits inlassablement au point parfois d’entraîner des lésions, ndlr]