As the Team Leader for RSPCA Victoria’s Inspectorate North East region, I manage a team of five Inspectors investigating animal cruelty reports from St Kilda to Albury and everywhere in between.

My team and I are on the front line, and we are often the first to see concerning trends and witness what pet ownership in Victoria really looks like.

Sadly, the ongoing drought and cost-of-living pressures are making it harder for people to care for their animals, and my team and I are seeing the impact first-hand.

The majority of what we deal with is not malicious cruelty, but neglect stemming from financial stress, poor access to feed, or personal challenges like mental health issues. These situations are incredibly complex, and our job is to balance enforcing animal welfare laws with helping people do better by their pets.

Wherever possible, my team and I try to support owners before things reach a crisis point.

This may be providing emergency pet food, bedding or kennels, or helping with preventative flea and worming treatments.

Sometimes, the animals’ owners recognise their animal’s well-being is at risk and choose to surrender their animal into our care, while sometimes, we need to step in and seize their animal.

In the last financial year, there were 543 animals from the North East seized by, or surrendered to, RSPCA Inspectors.

We’re extremely fortunate to work closely with local police and councils, and this support helps us to care for the community and their pets.

Other cases involved households simply being overwhelmed by the number of animals they had taken in.

In the North East, we are continually seeing unwanted litters due to animals not being desexed, leaving owners struggling to meet the demands of providing basic care for many, vulnerable young animals.

This year, RSPCA Victoria’s Animal Cruelty Report 2024/25 shows animal hoarding, hungry animals and horse cases are rising across the state.

In the last financial year, RSPCA Victoria responded to over 10,200 animal cruelty reports across the state.

Many of these involved animals being left without enough food, water or shelter, with horses hit particularly hard, and our region is no different.

We know times are tough, and many people are struggling to provide even the basics for the animals they love.

This is why community support is so important; reports from locals can sometimes be the reason an animal is rescued in time.

We rely on the generous support of the community for more than 90 per cent of our operating expenses.

To everyone who has made an animal cruelty report, thank you.

Your willingness to help fight animal cruelty means the world to us and, more importantly, to the animals whose lives are turned around because of it.

If you have concerns about the welfare of an animal, please make a report at rspcavic.org/cruelty-report.

Together, we can end cruelty to all animals.

Belinda Dent, RSPCA Inspectorate team leader (North East region).

Safe Food Victoria shows one size fits none

Australian Dairy Farmers (ADF) has called out “tokenistic” consultation behind the announcement to establish Safe Food Victoria – the organisation set to replace the specialist Dairy Food Safety Victoria (DFSV).

The so-called ‘consultation’ felt like more of an ultimatum.

You can’t consult when you don’t bring any genuine options to the table, you can only enforce your decision.

This is a solution in search of a problem.

Don’t dismantle a proven, specialist regulator and replace it with a one-size-fits-none bureaucracy.

The stakes are too high for guesswork.

ADF has been tracking these changes closely, not least because DFSV is seen as the leading organisation in food safety technical expertise across Australia’s dairy industry.

More milk is produced in Victoria than in any other state in Australia, so it makes sense that the bulk of our knowledge in this field is developed in Victoria.

Given we’ve not seen a business case for the transition to Food Safety Victoria, and nobody can outline any grounds for improvement at DFSV, we see this as a clear and blatant cash grab by the debt-stricken Victorian government.

DFSV doesn’t cost taxpayers anything; it’s fully funded by farmers – in fact, as we understand it, the organisation has a multi-million-dollar bank balance which will probably be consumed by consolidated government expenditure.

ADF has repeated its invitation for the Victorian Government to engage in good faith and reconsider how a cost-neutral organisation can continue to provide value to a vital industry.

If the Allan government truly wants to cut red tape, fix the audits and harmonise rules across councils.

Keep DFSV independent, risk-based and focused on dairy, rather than building a bigger bottleneck.

You don’t bulldoze the house to replace a door.

Ben Bennett, Australian Dairy Farmers president