Reporting a concern about animal welfare to us

When reporting an animal welfare concern to our cruelty helpline, we will treat your personal information in confidence and will only share it in the circumstances mentioned below or where we are authorised to do so by law.

We use your personal information for the purposes of animal welfare and for the prevention and detection of crime and to provide brief updates to you in relation to the investigation if requested.

We do not use your personal information for any other purpose unless we obtain your prior consent to do so. For example, where as a result of your telephone call to our cruelty helpline you wish to make a donation to us, your personal information will be used to process this donation and to keep in contact with you, only if you agree to us doing so.

Depending on the nature of your concern, we may need to pass information to enforcement agencies such as Trading Standards, Animal Plant and Health Agency (APHA), or law enforcement or to another animal welfare charity. We will only pass on your personal information where it is necessary for the purposes of investigating or resolving your concern.

From time to time we undertake statistical research on calls to our cruelty helpline to help us manage our service better. This data is anonymised and does not identify individuals’ personal data. We also use data and information from calls to our cruelty helpline as the basis for case studies for our educational, training, fundraising and marketing material, in our annual review and potentially for TV programmes featuring our work. Any personal data is always anonymised.

From time to time we also carry out customer service questionnaires which are conducted only for the purpose of measuring your satisfaction with the way your call was handled by our cruelty helpline in order to improve our service. These surveys are anonymous and  you will be asked for your consent to be contacted for this purpose.