Pounds also tend to sell dogs to anyone at all, to relieve overcrowding. Many pound-sold dogs are sold to be chained and neglected. That is not animal welfare.

The VCP also calls itself an animal shelter, implying that it houses species other than dogs. It doesn't impound any other species and to imply that it does is perhaps the most egregious falsehood of all and should have sent off warning signals to the media and to the Mayor and Councillors. AAS warned them of the dishonesty inherent in phoney P.R.

AAS cares that all treatment of animals be so honest that the facts cannot be hidden under a shroud of P.R science or P.R. patter. As long as the truth is hidden by false animal welfare P.R., the public is lulled into thinking there are no animal welfare problems that need their voices.

The truth is that there are a lot of dogs being deliberately made dangerous by chaining and penning and that until that is changed through the adoption of anti-yard/guard dog bylaws, the City Pound has to kill these dogs. We warned the City that taxpayers should know that their money was being spent to kill the hapless victims of abuse, instead of being used to stop the abuse and to prevent more attacks like the one on Shenica White in December 2002.

We asked Sun reporter, Nicholas Read, in 1998, to stop calling VCP a no-kill shelter. We told him that as long as the public was fooled, the facts would not be understood and dealt with and dogs would go on being abused, and the Pound would go on killing them. We were ignored.