Behind Battersea
The final in our series of interviews with some of the staff of Battersea.
We spoke to Scot Craddock, the Customer Relations Manager of Battersea Dogs & Cats Home.
What does your job involve?
Basically, the operational management of the customer side of the home, so I look after re-homing teams, the lost and found teams, reception staff and home visitors - probably 75 staff in total.
It involves lots of different things. Planning mainly. Looking at the whole operation, working with my colleague Laura, who's the Animal Welfare Manager, liaising with the other sites - Brands Hatch and Windsor - and I also deal with feedback from customers.
You must have to deal with some very challenging cases...
I've got a case at the moment where a person's dogs have strayed 30 times in twelve months and that involves dealing with the Local Authority and dealing with the police. We're trying to get a conviction on that particular case.
How do you judge whether a day's work has been successful?
The sense of achievement comes from doing something to improve the way things are run and what we do for the cats and the dogs in our care, and also from the customers that come in. A lot of my work focuses on the people side, helping them either by re-homing a dog or a cat, or with a difficult case where someone is bringing in a dog or a cat. It can be very distressing so we help them through that process and have to make sure we respond in an empathetic manner.
How much work does Battersea do with mistreated animals?
We don't campaign a lot, from a historical perspective, but we've tried to get involved with Local Authorities and the police in cases such as the one I mentioned earlier. It's just shocking. We're trying to get that responsible ownership across to people, along with the need to microchip dogs. Anything that we can do to try and make people understand and to try and limit what comes into us.
There's a lot of work that I'm doing because the law is changing with regards to the stray intake. At the moment the police have control and look after stray dogs out of hours and at weekends, but that's going to go to Local Authorities.
So, we have a lot of work to do to try and communicate to Local Authorities and let them understand what we do here and try to reunite dogs. We've got a fantastic database with the strays in, from the Lost and Found line.
How many animals do you reunite each year?
Last year, in total we took around 12,000 animals and we managed to reunite around 45%. We're just concentrating hard on trying to increase that number and getting the word out. With dogs the situation's good, but with cats we've got a lot of work to do because people don't realise we deal with cats here. Microchipping cats is less popular than microchipping dogs because cats tend to roam. So it's trying to put that message across too.
How did you get to work here?
I studied at Bournemouth University, a degree in Tourism Studies, and I worked in the travel industry for 10-12 years in customer service. I later got made redundant and temped for a while in travel and then thought I'd like to do something more worthwhile, saw this and applied.
Are there a lot of opportunities available to work at Battersea?
There's a variety of things you can do. There are two sides in terms of intake here, the animal side or the customer side. There's not a huge need on the customer side to have a wide cat or dog knowledge. Obviously, you have to have an understanding and it helps. But we have jobs in say Lost and Found that deal more with the customers.
We need strong customer service skills, people who can talk to people and understand the problems they are dealing with. On the kennels side an empathy with dogs and cats is helpful. There are lots of opportunities, there are so many different departments and people don't realise how big it is.
A lot of staff take part in the fostering programme, do you?
I can't foster dogs because I live in a flat, but I foster dogs in the office, if there's a need to help its behaviour or its development then I'm all for that. I currently have two dogs in the office at the moment.
