In an article in the Nanaimo Star, pound contractor Dan Hughes sounds caring and animal-loving - but he is a dog disposal contractor.

Like most municipalities, especially the City of Vancouver, the City of Nanaimo is being dishonest by calling its pound the Nanaimo Animal Shelter. The meaning of the word "shelter" does not include killing the "sheltered", and this whole debate would be a lot clearer if everyone, especially the media, stopped referring to any place that kills the inhabitants by the word shelter. Would the media call a women's shelter by that name if it killed the women who were hard to help? If everyone who strives to make all pounds into true shelters keeps calling places that kill by the wrong name, then they must expect the media to continue to brainlessly promote this lie and for the fight to stop the killing to take much longer than it might.

Hughes' pound kills some of the dogs it impounds and so it does not shelter in the proper meaning of the word, and for the City of Nanaimo to call his facility a shelter is now standard p.r. spin in the pound business. Every dog-disposing contractor and municipal pound is calling itself an animal shelter. Not so long ago a pound was a pound and no bones about it. If you took your dog to a pound, it would almost certainly be killed and you were not considered very nice. But thanks to the SPCA calling its pounds "shelters" for 50 years, everyone can pretend that their dog isn't going to be killed when they take it that nice "shelter". The BC SPCA successfully used this semantic confusion to attract millions in donations for 50 years from animal lovers who did not understand the dog disposal contracting business, and it is still using the confusion to its advantage to this day. It has said that it will continue its contracting business (in places where the SPCA is not unionized) and it continues to call its facilities shelters even though it is still killing the "sheltered", in some places, by the hundreds.

Dan Hughes runs a dog disposal contracting business on Vancouver Island and has many municipal contracts. He has for many years. About eight years ago, a group of women tried to get Duncan to make him stop using the electrothanator to kill dogs, but Hughes was buddies with some of the councillors and they backed him. I attended that farce of a council meeting and I have the newspaper clippings and the presentation from those strong, decent women, who were unafraid to say what they knew about Mr Hughes' business.

See how an electrothanator kills dogs (Warning, unpleasant reading): http://www.animaladvocates.com/spca-electrothanator-history.htm and http://www.animaladvocates.com/spca-electrothanators.htm