There are some business slogans that work so well that they endure a long time. "We will not be undersold". "Satisfaction guaranteed". "We will not turn an animal away".

I don't know about the other two slogans, but "we will not turn an animal away" hides a truth that is so vile that once it is understood, it makes animal lovers very angry.

According to the BC SPCA itself, there is a new home, even a bad new home, for about one cat in 30 in most parts of BC. Yet the SPCA takes thousands of cats a year for which there is no outcome but death. It claims that not turning an animal away is animal welfare, but real animal welfare does not include staff trained in cheap killing of sick or unsold animals. Killing the healthy is not an option in honest animal welfare. In 2001 the SPCA announced a "moratorium on killing for space", but retained its unlimited intake policy so space still had to be made. The fine print in the moratorium - which the public believed was a no-kill policy so donations surged - said that animals could still be killed for many reasons: behaviour, illness, and that serviceable catch-all excuse for killing for space, for being vaguely and by anyone's interpretation, "unadoptable".

Disease gave the SPCA the handiest excuse for killing a lot of animals in its "care". Even if the SPCA's overcrowded, cheap, diseased facilities makes its animals sick, it gets to use that sickness to justify killing them. It gets all its free "product" (the SPCA's own word for its animals) by encouraging the public to dump their pets at an SPCA and then it blames that public for killing a lot of them.

It is a business plan that worked successfully for a hundred years, all over North America.