Advertisement

Gilchrist: ‘The Mad Woman of Animals’ bids farewell to Kenya

Saturday August 19 2017
jean

Slender, grey-haired and with a Scottish accent, 82-year-old Jean Gilchrist has few regrets as she comes to the end of her service as director of KSPCA. PHOTO | KARI MUTU | NMG

By KARI MUTU

The name Jean Gilchrist in Kenya is synonymous with animal protection.

In the 30 years she has worked for the Kenya Society for the Protection and Care of Animals (KSPCA), Gilchrist has been scratched and bitten by animals more times than she can recall. “But animals are not vindictive,” says the crusader who has been nicknamed the “mad woman of animals.”

Slender, grey-haired and with a Scottish accent, 82-year-old Gilchrist has few regrets as she comes to the end of her service as director of KSPCA.

It all started in the early 1980s when she rescued a kitten and its mother from her roof. She contacted KSPCA, at that time a small outfit operating out of a room in an office building, with no space for cages or enclosures for rescued animals. Gilchrist had no background in animal care but had always been enthusiastic about animals. She started volunteering with the society.

“Any strays we found, we gave to the vets or took them in ourselves,” says the soft-spoken Gilchrist, who moved from Tanzania to Kenya in 1972.

The society employed her as a field officer in 1986. By that time, KSPCA had moved to its current location in the Karen, Nairobi, purchased through a donation from a well-wisher. The premises had enough space for an animal shelter.

Advertisement

The new site started with about 20 animals and now houses 140 dogs and 50 cats, some rescued from the streets and others offloaded by owners who can no longer care for them.

“The trouble with being a shelter is that you become a dumping ground,” she says. During the interview in her office, her three dogs, all rescued by the KSPCA — two with only three legs each — were lying under her desk.

For Gilchrist, a typical day is a combination of office work, kennel rounds to check on the animals, fieldwork, fundraising, handling pet adoptions, and retrieving abandoned or abused animals — a risky undertaking.

“You get quite a lot of aggression from the public, especially in some of the informal settlements that we go to,” she says. Often times, KSPCA workers have to be accompanied by the police. “And it’s not the sort of job that you make money out of,” she says, emphasising that a love for animals is essential.

KSPCA has more than 20 employees who include animal inspectors, field officers, administrative staff and kennel workers. “We have a full-time vet and one working half-day. With 140 dogs, there is always an animal falling ill,” Gilchrist says.

As authorised animal officers under the Ministry of Livestock, KSPCA responds to over 6,000 calls annually including reports of cruelty and abandonment.

“It’s rather like being a policeman. You can be called upon to remove a distressed animal any time,” she says.

Gilchrist and her team have saved nestling wild birds from trees about to be cut down, seized abused domestic pigs and donkeys, and received exotic animals rescued from illegal exporters at the airport. All these animals end up at the shelter.

Animal cruelty is a major concern for Gilchrist, which is why education and animal welfare advocacy is one of her key platforms. She also decries irresponsibility by some pet owners who choose not to neuter their pets, leading to unnecessary breeding.

“People get three or four bitches and suddenly they’ve got 20 puppies and then they call us,” she says. “But there has been a big improvement over the past 30 years.”

Despite neutering campaigns by KSPCA, overbreeding among stray dogs remains problematic. She also faults unscrupulous commercial breeders. “They sometimes keep dogs in rabbit hutches, and breed them at every mating cycle and this has flooded the market with unwanted animals,” she says.

KSPCA’s efforts to stop the illegal sale of pets on Nairobi’s streets was halted when, during one campaign, their car was smashed, a KSPCA officer was hit with a stone and a man threatened to slit Gilchrist’s throat with a broken bottle. “We are not trained in combat and we were getting no help from the police or the city council,” she said.

During Gilchrist’s tenure, KSPCA successfully rallied a number of slaughterhouses in the country to use stun bolt guns for the humane slaughter of cattle. The society is now the sole importer and distributor of the guns and blank ammunition.

Another long-fought campaign by the society is the lobbying of the national veterinary services to end the blanket culling of dogs during rabies outbreaks by using strychnine, a rodent poison banned in Europe.

“Death by strychnine is agonising and it is against the Hippocratic Oath,” she says.

KSPCA has successfully controlled rabies outbreaks through vaccination campaigns.

After 50 years in Africa, Gilchrist is going back to the UK with mixed feelings.

“It will be very sad to leave. This has been my home for all these years,” she says wistfully. “But I’m getting a bit old and you need to be active when you are doing animal welfare, so it’s about time.”

Advertisement