Cruelty takes a toll on animals – and the woman who defends them

NSPCA inspector Wrolien Rabie stands between farm animals and their suffering, often alone, sometimes afraid. For her, compassion is both a duty and a burden - one that she carries without fanfare.

- By Don Pinnock

When Wrolien Rabie stepped foot on a farm one morning to inspect the animals, a burly farmer growled at her: “You're very brave for a woman to walk alone on this farm, aren't you?”

To Rabie, it wasn’t bravery. It was duty. In that moment, she wasn’t a woman defying expectations — she was an inspector doing her job, driven by a fierce commitment to protect the voiceless.

This brief exchange encapsulates the complex world Rabie inhabits, one in which compassion collides with cruelty and in which the emotional shock that can result from enforcing animal welfare laws comes with few protections.

Rabie is an inspector with the National Council of Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (NSPCA), specialising in farm animal welfare. Her days are spent traversing rural roads, inspecting commercial farms and intervening in cases of neglect and abuse.

Behind the badge lies a profound emotional toll, a weight she carries quietly as she stands between animals and their suffering. “I never saw myself as a woman walking on to that farm,” she reflects. “I saw myself as an inspector looking for animals that might need help.”

But the reality is more complicated. As a woman in a traditionally male-dominated sphere, she faces scepticism and even hostility. Once, a man grabbed her by the neck when she refused to return a dog he had abandoned with stab wounds. “He wanted the dog back, even though he left it to suffer. We had to fight him off,” she says.