THE RSPCA. our leading animal charity  receives more than  £100m a year in donations from a munificent public. It keeps the bequests flooding in not least by paying some £200.000 a week to its network of high street solicitors to act for it in prosecuting farmers and others for cruelty. ensuring through its publicity machine that these cases get maximum publicity.

Typical was the spate of coverage the RSPCA won in January for raiding Spindles Farm in Amersham, Bucks, when 125 horses and donkeys were seized from farmer James Gray, in what seemed an open and shut case.

As reported here before, however (see Eyes 1201 and 1203), the RSPCA's methods had already been coming under heavy fire from a succession of judges and magistrates. Several of its cases were thrown out, notably in Harwich, Portsmouth and Norwich. Seized animals which had survived the RSPCA's animal establishments were ordered to be returned to their owners. The charity was repeatedly criticised for preparing witnesses, with the aid of pro-forma statements and pre-trial meetings, in defiance of court rules.

Also widely reported was the RSPCA's killing in December of Gangotri, an injured cow in a Hertfordshire Hindu temple, although the RSPCA kills more than 65,000 animals a year (thousands of them entirely healthy). The monks were outraged by the RSPCA's entry to "euthanise" the animal, claiming to have a court warrant. No warrant was, in fact, even applied for until the next day.

Several large Hindu demonstrations in Parliament Square and at the charity's Horsham HQ were supported by farmers and others, protesting at the RSPCA's growing officiousness. MPs queued up to sign an early-day motion deploring the Gangotri incident, and the Hindus are now seeking redress in the high court.

This may help explain what happened when the Spindle's farm case came up in Oxford this month before Judge Sandeep Kainth. The court heard from an independent equine vet that none of the animals seized from Gray had actually been "caused unnecessary suffering", and conditions at the farm were of "extremely good quality".

Although the case is not concluded, Judge Kainth ordered the RSPCA to return 29 animals to Mr Gray forthwith and the rest, as his lawyers asked, were to be sold at auction with the proceeds going to Mr Gray. Returning the animals to their owner "put them at no risk". Naturally this sent the RSPCA's publicity machine into overdrive, to explain how its efforts had met with such an unexpected reverse (it now wants Mr Gray to pay £153,000 which it says it spent looking after the animals, and is considering an appeal).

The RSPCA's "Campaigns, Media and Science" department (annual cost £7 Am) again went into overdrive, supported as usual by the BBC, in attacking the Welsh Assembly's decision to allow the culling of TB infected badgers. Bovine TB is decimating Welsh cattle herds, but Radio 4's Today programme meekly permitted an activist to repeat the well rehearsed claim that there is no evidence that culling badgers reduces the incidence of TB in cattle.

Today failed to explain that, in the days when culling infected badgers was still legal, bovine TB was completely eradicated. Only when the culling of infected badgers was banned in the 1980s did the problem reappear, eventually reaching today's epidemic proportions. The government says the cost of TB to taxpayers alone will soon exceed £2bn. However, to the RSPCA, an infected badger is as much a sacred animal as Gangotri was to the Hindus.