Members Day meeting:- March 14th

Dawn and Pat with some of the Woodgreen merchandise on sale.

The hall for the members day meeting was just about packed to the rafters!!

The meeting was Chaired by Bridget Garnet and opened as usual with the previous minutes and current business.

Visitors from surrounding WI's, including Church Langley and Nazeing joined us for a very enjoyable afternoon.

We were alerted to other WI groups that are available in the hall-

Monday-Darts

Tuesday- Games

Thursday- Book club.

There is also the walking group and the theatre group which is run by Jennifer Quinn.

There is also a 'coffee club' that meets in the cricket club on a tuesday 204pm. Coffee is 50per cup.

The speaker for the afternoon was Dawn from Woodgreen animal shelter.

Dawn gave us an inspiring insight to the life of the animals and on the variety of animals who are catered for an Wood green.

Most species of animal have passed through Wood green at some point since the centre was first established in 1924 by Miss Louisa Snow when she opened the front room of her house in Lordship Lane. Animals including the obvious, cats, dogs, rabbits, horses etc, but as well as the normal domesticated animals such as goats, ducks, pigs and sheep have passed through there on their way to re-homing. A hefty figure of 5,000 animals have needed the services of Woodgreen in the past year alone!

With more than 50% of the UK population now owning a pet, 8 million of each cats and dogs and around 3 million of other species, many of these end up at Woodgreen to be re-homed for a variety of reason. Often owners have to leave their animals there due to changes in their circumstances, ill health, emigration, the loss of the owners homes, the animals behaviour problems or due to the family having a new baby.

Only 45% of stray cats and dogs are re-homed and more than 4% of the strays found need veterinary care which adds to the already heavy costs of caring for the animals. Woodgreen always encourage neutering or spaying of all cats and dogs to try and limit the numbers of unwanted animals currently in the system.

The shelter runs a rescue service where unwanted dogs are brought over from Ireland who have the highest figures of dogs being put to sleep. In the past approximately 13,000 dogs were put to sleep but these figures have dramatically reduced over the years from 20,000 in the period of 2000-2001. Scotland only put to sleep 1,000 unwanted dogs.

Woodgreen runs wholly on donations from members of the public and is not lottery and government assisted at all.

There are many ways to raise funds for Woodgreen ie money left to the shelter after a death, collection tins, fund raising events, such as Woodgreen merchandise, boot sales, table top sales, etc, but one which was highlighted and one that we can all help with is the collection of used postage stamps. The shelter can receive an amount of money per every ton of stamps collected.

I don't know about most of you, but I have a bag of used stamps sitting around in a drawer at home not wanting to throw them away, but not really knowing what to do with them!

If anybody would like to bring their used stamps to the WI meetings, I am volunteering my help to arrange for their delivery to the shelter.

please try and tear the stamp off of the envelope as close as you can to the stamp. Thank you.

For more information on Woodgreen, please visit their website-

http://www.woodgreen.org.uk/ Registered charity No- 298348

***Nobody correctly answered the web site question I posed after February's meeting, so I will be rolling the competition over to Aprils meeting. There will be a prize for the person with the correct answer. The answer is on this site!!

Next meeting- April 11th with the speaker topic of - 'Underwater wreck diving'.

Don't forget your used stamps!!