About Celia Hammond

Celia Hammond was a top model in the 60’s, appearing on countless Vogue covers and travelling all over the world on photographic assignments.

Although she became a vegetarian in her teens, she ironically became one of the country’s top fur models – until she saw some footage on television of the Canadian seal cull and told of her horror in a press interview.

Contacted by Lady Dowding of the charity Beauty Without Cruelty, Celia agreed to fly to the Gulf of St Lawrence, as an observer of the seal cull for BWC.

Having witnessed the appalling cruelty of the seal hunt, she immediately vowed never to model fur again and persuaded all the top models of the day to give up promoting fur.

This resulted in a great deal of publicity and Celia realised that her modelling career gave her an ideal platform from which to campaign against the fur trade, factory farming, vivisection, and other animal abuses including, much later, the live export of sheep, calves and pigs across Europe from the UK.

In the mid 60’s, Celia also became involved in rescuing, neutering and rehoming stray and unwanted animals. She learned how to trap feral cats, developing her own equipment, and started to trap, neuter and return to suitable sites many thousands of feral cats at a time when euthanasia of feral cats was considered the only option. She fought many battles with local authorities, hospitals, environmental health departments and succeeded over several years in elevating the status of feral cats from near vermin to animals worthy of humane treatment and showing that control could be achieved by neutering and not killing. She opened a sanctuary in the country for the many cats that could not, because of redevelopment or demolition of existing sites, could not be returned to their own environment and rehomed many thousands of neutered, vaccinated ferals on smallholdings, farms and stables.

Celia’s work with animals became so all consuming that in the early 70’s she gave up her career to devote her life to animal welfare and has since then been deeply involved in rescuing and rehoming many ten’s of thousands of animals, mainly stray and abandoned animals off the streets. Because she felt so strongly that the huge feral cat population derived largely from an uncontrolled domestic cat population, she passionately believed that the establishment of low cost neuter clinics, such as those operating so effectively in Canada and the USA, would offer a humane solution to the ever increasing unwanted animal population in the UK.

This idea was not popular at the time, so in 1986 she founded the Celia Hammond Animal Trust, with the main objective of setting up low cost neuter and vaccination clinics, thus bringing responsible pet ownership within the reach of everyone. After a huge fund raising effort, the first clinic opened in Lewisham, South East London, in October 1995 and was fully booked almost from day one. After a short while an average of fifty dogs and one hundred cats were being neutered every week. In January 1999 a second clinic was opened in East London and was soon neutering the same numbers. Both London clinics operate a 24-hour rescue/rehoming service. Celia’s sanctuary in East Sussex usually has around three hundred animals either awaiting rehoming or resident in comfort in the sanctuary’s sixty acres of beautiful countryside for the rest of their lives.

Celia is still very involved with her charity working seven days a week running the clinics and dealing with emergency rescue calls, often through the night.