This week, a man brought a young, attractive dog to a local SPCA for surrender saying that he couldn't keep it anymore. The SPCA employee only said that they would find it a nice home.

You bet they will - at least they will find it some kind of home, if no better than the one that dumped it - this was a highly sellable dog. The man has no reason not to repeat this in the future because it was so easy - no fee, no penalty, no work, no guilt.

This week a man brought a rottie cross to a local SPCA for surrender. He was told that the dog may have to be killed. There are very few good homes for rottie crosses and the dog will be luckier to be killed than sold to someone who will chain it as a guard dog which is too often what SPCA customers are there to buy. The man handed over his dog anyway. Why not? He got what he came for - free disposal of his dog, no fee, no penalty, no work, and yes, no guilt, because if he was capable of real guilt he wouldn't hand his dog over.

This is how the dog disposal business works. Free product is delivered to your door everyday. Some is sellable, some isn't. You kill the unsellable.

For everyone who doesn't understand how this business works, here's the rules:

If you have pound contracts and\or unlimited surrender, you are properly called a dog pound - not a shelter. You can only properly be called a shelter if you do not kill the inhabitants, and to avoid that you have to say No to any dog that you may have to kill. Unlimited surrender provides lots of free product to sell, but also lots of damaged goods that are unsellable and will have to be killed to be disposed of.

If you have pound contracts and/or unlimited surrender you will have to find a way to hide the killing that is the by-product of those two revenue sources.

Here's the new way of doing the pet abandonment/disposal business:

Move Product: Sell more. Sell faster. Advertise pets as lifestyle accessories. Move product in the malls. All excellent ideas if the same high standards for new homes that AAS, OKAWF, Big Heart, FOTA, PAF etc have are met. But we know that the SPCA says it does careful screening and home checks and we know that is not true, so this kind of advertising is good for business, not good for dogs. Quick sales and low standards are a betrayal of the dog, but "move product" fast. Is it likely that any "shelter" that has a lot of dogs coming in everyday would turn down many customers?

Foster homes: We know that there are almost zero foster homes that can cope. We know that the SPCA and VCP, who claim to the media to have hundreds of wonderful foster homes, are lying, that they put dogs in unchecked homes and are never heard from again. This is a betrayal of the dog, but it is another way of moving product fast.

Pre-sale sterilization: Good of course. But SPCA pounds got so much flak over selling breeding stock that they have had to spend some money on this p.r. disaster. But it is only sticking a thumb in the hole in the dike, it won't stop the number of dogs being purchased and dumped. If people can't buy a pup from their neighbour, they will seek out breeders and pet stores. It is the disposal business making it easy to change your mind that is the root cause of all the impounding and killing, not unsterilized dogs. No one can stop the purchase. In a free society we can buy what we want as long as we have the money. But society can stop the easy disposal. And if we did, a lot of the purchase would stop.

Is the SPCA doing anything to stop disposal when it makes it so easy by never saying No? Is it doing anything to discourage dumping when it encourages purchasing? Of course not. It is profiting from the purchase and disposal culture that it is a necessary part of.

The new way of profiting from pet abandonment is to hang onto the sources of free product - the pound contracts and the unlimited surrender - and use modern marketing techiniques like the BC SPCA's glitzy sales campaigns, selling dogs as lifestyle accessories, and with branch contests to see which can move the most product the fastest.

The new way of doing the pet abandonment business is to have a tool ready to explain why all those dogs had to be killed. And all the most successful pet disposing businesses have such a tool. The BC SPCA calls theirs CAMP.

As long as there is easy pet abandonment, the pet abandonment industry will flourish, only modernizing their way of doing business and using p.r. firms and the media to market themselves, but never disturbing the reason the business exists - easy pet abandonment.

Will easy disposal ever stop? Not as long as animal lovers do not understand that easy disposal is the source of income for everyone in the pound/disposal business, the bosses and the employees, and that it is the root of the evil they abhor, and they demand that the SPCA end its pet disposal business by changing its policy from unlimited surrender to no surrender, or at the least, to limited surrender where the doors close instead of killing some slow-moving product to make room for more product.