From the Vernon SPCA's newsletter of August 2003:

"Every year the SPCA receives hundreds of unwanted animals and finding them all homes is very difficult.

Many animals are surrendered because owners are moving and can no longer care for them. One of the main reasons animals are brought into the shelter is a lack of spaying and neutering. We have received over three hundred kittens in the last three months. Finding 300 suitable homes is not very easy. Some of these kittens will grow up in the shelter. One example of this is a young black cat that stayed at our shelter for a whole year. She has since been adopted!!!!

Please have your animals spayed or neutered. Reduce the overpopulation problem by being responsible."

OKAWF comment:

Aside from wondering whether the young black cat that spent a year at the Vernon facility was spayed PRIOR to being sold, OKAWF is becoming very tired of the candy coating the SPCA continues to use to sugar over the reality of what it does.

Phrases like "finding them all homes is very difficult" are misleading, placating pablum. The SPCA doesn't find them all homes. The Vernon SPCA killed the majority of adult cats surrendered to its "shelter" in the kitten-season summer months. Volunteers know this, the vet techs who were hired to kill them know this, and I, the casual but informed observer know this. I was at the Vernon SPCA at the end of May and saw a facility jammed full of adult cats - 60 or 70 at least. When I returned 3 weeks later, there were almost 100 kittens and only 4 adults that I could count. No one can place 60 cats in 3 weeks in a town the size of Vernon, not even the SPCA.

Vernon SPCA's euthanasia log details the killing - a volunteer describes seeing at least 50 entries for euthanized felines in June.
Recently Vernon SPCA's euthanasia logs have been hidden away from view of volunteers, in the manager's office.

As long as the SPCA maintains its policy of unlimited surrender, it must kill the unsellable. And as long as it wants to keep receiving donations it must sugar coat the story it gives the donating public.

And as usual, that is self serving, not animal serving.

The public needs to know how many cats the BC SPCA killed in June 2003. It needs to know how many dogs and cats the BC SPCA kills every month every year. THEN perhaps a shocked and sickened public will spay and neuter, once it has learned the horrible truth.

A sugar glazed placated public, living in a fantasy world painted by an SPCA that denies killing animals - insisting only that finding homes for them is "very difficult" - will continue to allow their animals to reproduce, content in the believed theory that the SPCA will find them homes, no matter how difficult. More importantly, they'll even buy into the fantasy by donating to the very organization that takes their box of cats and kittens, believing that the SPCA will find them homes, even though it is "very diffiult".

The wrongdoing occurs on so many levels, but what it boils down to always is honesty. If the SPCA were only to be honest about everything it does, true animal welfare could happen, and there would be no more need for sugar coating and newsletters full of false impressions.

Jennifer Dickson
Okanagan Animal Welfare Foundation
Vernon B.C.