Both the President and the acting CEO of the BC SPCA have said that the SPCA's dog assessment test, CAMP, is only a draft. This is not true as CAMP was adopted as policy by the BC SPCA Board of Directors on May 10, 2002, but it does make it sound as though the much-hated and very questionable program was never official.

AAS member, Joann Bessler, has made these observations:

The research protocol may change during the course of the research. Specifically, the "CAMP Procedural Manual for Phase One" states that one of the Phase 4 goals is to "evaluate and refine CAMP practices" (p.4). Are we already in Phase 4?

The same manual also directs that animals are only to be transferred if, among other criteria, "they have been classified as green zone (adoptable) animals" (p. 41).

So, CAMP Phase 1 instructs that orange zone animals are not to be transferred, but the manual also states that the protocols will be changed in the future.

There are two problems with evaluating the effectiveness of CAMP:

1) We don't know what the protocols or the outcomes are.
Because of SPCA secrecy, we don't know which sections of the Phase 1 CAMP Procedural Manual have been superseded. CAMP's mission, "... to improve the welfare of companion animals in shelters and the community...." is laudable, the SPCA should be trumpeting CAMP from the mountaintops if they're proud of it.

The SPCA has not, as far as I know, ever published statistics on outcomes. We can not objectively measure improvement without data; we must know intake, adoption, and kill figures.

2) CAMP policy has not been uniformly applied.
Even for researchers with access to all of the current CAMP protocols and intake vs outcome statistics, it has become clear that procedures have fluctuated from shelter to shelter at the whim of local staff. It would be extremely difficult for any defensible conclusion to be drawn from such a flawed case study.

Joann Bessler,
MSc