Animals are lovely, but human babies matter too
Talk to someone involved in charity fundraising about which causes people in Britain like supporting and the chances are you will hear some good-natured joshing about the country’s enormous love of animals, with donations to look after them often dwarfing those for all sorts of excellent causes involving humans.
Rather more shocking however is one of the nuggets of information in Professor Cathy Nutbrown‘s recent interim report into early years education in our country. She found that colleges usually require more qualifications for someone to be trained to look after animals than they do from people who want to be trained to look after babies.
Dogs are cute, cats may dominate the internet, but babies should not be treated as if they matter less than either.
You are right; babies are treated with less respect than animals. I read something recently which I found really tragic. This is a research paper written on the subject of child abandonment in 2009: –
http://www.afoundling.co.uk/policy2.pdf
Though I've looked, I can't find any evidence that the Labour or Coalition governments have acted on this issue. The government keeps no national statistics on how many babies are abandoned, so that the authors of the report had to get their information from the media. There are no national guidelines issued to health authorities on this issue and also, no studies have been made that I can find on how to identify or help the vulnerable mothers involved in these tragic cases. This report was written three years ago – nothing seems to have changed.
Sorry, I get really steamed up about this issue.
I agree with you on the second paragraph – but the amount given to animal charities is actually a very small proportion of all charitable giving – just 6% of all charitable giving in 2011 by amount, compared to 17% for medical research, 16% for religious causes, 11% for children, 10% for each of hospitals and overseas. So overall 94% of charitable giving in the UK is dedicated to humans.
11% kids and 6% animals…..frankly we should be ashamed of ourselves!
That we barely give twice as much to kids charities as animals shows what a strange bunch we can be.
I have no problem with pets, they tick a box for some, but seriously!!
Compare that to our northern cousins in Scandinavian countries who give four times as much to kids causes and have many, many less social problems because they put humans (clearly) first(that's not the only reason, but a contributing factor)….I am shocked but not surprised though.
Not quite that stark – eg, hospitals and medical causes will also include kids (children's hospital, leukemia research etc). As I say, the actual divide is 94:6 in favour of 'human' over 'animal' charities.