DSPCA Inspector

eire1

Hey all, my friend is really interested in working for the DSPCA and working her way up to some day be an inspector. Does anybody have any advice about joining the DSPCA (or similar) and working your way up through the ranks?
Any info please.
Cheers

mikemac

I don't but I will say if your friend is an animal lover it may not be the job for her.
She will seeing animals in a terrible state and instructing staff to kill some animals.

Squemish people need not apply

Maybe do some volunteer work with an animal shelter, good experience and it'd be good for the interview
This is the first place I thought of

Clare Bear

Had an interview for the DSPCA a while back and the interview alone put me off...being an animal lover is one thing but you have to be seriously strong to do this job, I'd love to have taken it but I just didn't think I'd be able for the things I would have had to deal with.

Good luck to your friend if she's able for it, check out the DSPCA website, should be some information on there.

eire1

Yeah she is an animal lover. I had reservations about it too, I'd just want to kill the people who treated the animals like ****e! Cheers for the link.

pwd

I worked in the old DSPCA animal shelter in Rathfarnham for summer 1998.
I got the job through the student summer job scheme.

I agree it would be a good idea to do some voluntrary work in a shelter before trying to get a job as an inspector. That will show both parties whether she would be ok to do the job without getting distressed - the above posters are not exaggerating that it can distress some people. Even in the few months I was there I saw some horrifying examples of cruelty: There were two horses that had been beaten and starved. They had lived off their own faeces for weeks, as far as I recall. They had rotting wounds on their bodies that stank, their eyes bulged out of their skulls in an alarming manner, they had badly upset stomachs. One of them fell down without cause and two of us had to push and pull him for him to able to get back on his feet. The creatures were in such bad condition that visitors to the shelter who saw them expressed disgust rather than sympathy.
A lot of the animals there get sick and die. You can't get emotionally attached to them for that reason. Some of the animals are bad-tempered too, reasonably enough considering the background. There were fewer bad tempered ones than you'd expect though.
I didn't go out with the inspectors on any calls, so I can't comment much on that side, but the people she'd be meeting would be the worst scumbags. You wouldn't want to be scared of travellers either I'd imagine.

All that said, if she does have the stomach for it, she should really go for it. I got a sense of deep satisfaction from working there that was absent in any other job I've done. A feeling of doing something worthwhile.

edit:
I'm not sure if the idea of joining to work her way up to inspector is practical, come to think of it. I don't know how they recruit, but looking at the web page there are only four inspectors - and at least two of them were there when I worked there 9 years ago...so I wouldn't say they have vacancies very frequently. There wasn't a large number of permanent staff in other roles when I was there either (only three spring to mind in fact).

Dubit10

ya

hockey1

pwd who are you ive been with the ds for years