Scottish SPCA plans new centre to help troubled young people

Others might never have felt an animal’s warm body and small heart beating, or walked in the countryside and come face to face with a cow, sheep or goat.

Now, in a bold effort to unite fragile children and families with nature, the nation’s main animal welfare charity, the Scottish SPCA, has unveiled ambitious plans to transform a former colliery building into a groundbreaking education hub.

The £850,000 million vision would see the former Devon Colliery’s Beam Engine House, a tall stone building just a few yards from the charity’s Clackmannanshire animal rescue centre, transformed to showcase its life-saving work.

To help visitors, there are plans for interactive touch screens, digital games, information boards and physical props, plus camera links which would enable them to view animals in recovery following treatment and track their release back to the wild.

As well as offering the general public an opportunity to learn about the daily risks animals face and how they are nurtured back to health, the education hub will provide a base for the charity’s work with “at risk” children.

There, children referred from a range of professional sources will be taught vital lessons about human and animal behaviour with a view to helping them develop fresh empathy and compassion for the natural world.

In addition, the charity’s plans include outdoor play and adventure facilities, including the opportunity for visitors to take a “hands-on” role in activities such as mini-beast identification, analysis of owl pellets to establish diet trends, and building bird and bat boxes.

It is also hoped the facility’s use of Devon Colliery’s former beam pumping engine shed will revive interest in the area’s coal-mining heritage and draw industrial heritage tourists to a corner of Clackmannanshire often bypassed by visitors.

Gilly Mendes Ferreira, head of education, policy and research at the Scottish SPCA, said full plans for the site near the small community of Fishcross have now been drawn up and a major crowdfunding drive will be launched within weeks.

“We have big ambitions for the site,” she added. “We have a working wildlife hospital on the site which handles over 10,000 animals a year including birds, seals, otters, badgers and many others.

“But people still think of us as the ‘animal cruelty’ charity. It makes sense for us to educate people about what we do, about nature and the environment.”

As well as teaching people how to respond should they encounter an apparently injured animal, she said the centre would help address the issues of the digital age by encouraging children to explore the outdoors and the nature on their own doorsteps.

“Children are no longer playing outdoors, but there are mental health benefits to being outside and around nature,” said Mendes Ferreira. “We want to capture that and offer fun activities, family days, holiday clubs.”

However, perhaps the most crucial element of the centre’s work, she continued, will be with vulnerable young people who have either already harmed animals or are at risk of developing negative attitudes to them.

“Through our preventative work with schools we are in touch with up to 200,000 children a year. We are aware we are meeting children who have never been for a walk in the countryside, never seen farm animals, there are kids who have had no contact with pets because the family’s lifestyle doesn’t suit.

“Our Animal Guardians programme is already working with children referred to us because they have shown concerning behaviours towards animals, some may have sadly have killed animals for different reasons. We want to offer a trauma facility, where young people who have not had the opportunity to be outdoors and have fun can have different types of experiences, and offer family groups space to bond with each other.”

The charity’s Animal Guardians programme was launched in 2018 for primary age schoolchildren who have shown negative behaviours towards animals, including being rough with pets or injuring animals.

The programme currently involves children working with a Scottish SPCA youth engagement officer during school time, when they take part in activities designed to help them learn about animal emotions and needs, and how to behave responsibly around animals.

It was launched in response to research which has shown children who experience adverse childhood experiences such as neglect, abuse and bullying, or witness violence, can go on to display cruelty to animals. In extreme cases, animal cruelty in childhood has been linked to criminal behaviour in adulthood, including domestic violence.

Education programmes which teach appropriate behaviour and encourage children to interact with animals are believed to help reduce the risk of animal abuse in the future.

Meanwhile, another key element of the education hub’s role will be to educate the public on how to respond to injured animals. “People think they are being helpful but sometimes they can actually do more harm than good,” added Mendes Ferreira. “For example, we get a lot of baby birds brought to us which would probably have been fine if they had been left alone in the first place.

“We also have people who pick up seal pups and put them in the back of the car to bring here, but they don’t need to be picked up at all.

“Our hope is to get people out here to see examples of how leaving animals alone can give them a better chance of survival.”

She said the charity is also hoping to shake its image as an organisation which steps in to remove animals which are in danger or have been abused, and to highlight its positive work, including efforts to ensure owners in poverty do not have to give up much-loved pets, and its animal hospital.

Work to create the new centre is to be split into two phases. The first will see the building which once housed the Devon Colliery’s beam pumping engine reborn at a cost of around £100,000, while a new custom-designed classroom is expected to cost the charity a further £750,000.

The Devon Colliery was the largest and longest-lasting colliery in Clackmannanshire. Originally leased to the Alloa Coal Company in 1843, flooding forced its closure just over a decade later.

However, it reopened in 1879 following the installation of the Beam Engine House and its impressive pumping engine, which at its peak could pump 2,560 gallons of water per minute out of the colliery.

Draining the pit took a year, after which the steam engine was also used to drive machinery until 1932 when electric pumps were installed. The colliery closed in 1960, ending at least 450 years of coalmining in the area around Sauchie Tower. However, the Beam Engine House was restored in 1993 and is one of the few surviving beam engines in Scotland.

Mendes Ferreira said it is hoped the education centre will also revive interest in the area’s industrial heritage.

“The Beam Engine House has been sitting there not doing very much,” she added. “Clackmannan Heritage Trust has given us lots of information about the history of the site and we want to capture that too, so people will know about the architecture, engineering and industrial heritage.”