The PCA Act has been used by the SPCA as a blunt instrument to raid an innocent cat shelter, and now it may be being misrepresented to avoid raiding a puppymill, one that may be not such an apparent pushover.

Worse...the Act may be being used to criminalize the innocent on specious and questionable grounds. It certainly is not being applied with any consistency, in fact it is being applied with questionable inconsistency.

If the SPCA will not raid a puppymill with hundreds of dogs, then a puppymill cannot be defined by its numbers. If the SPCA will not raid a dog breeding operation based on dogs being kept permanently outside, especially in the baking heat of summer and sub-zero temperatures of the BC interior, without heat, then why will it raid a small dog breeding operation where all the dogs live in the owner's house?

If the SPCA will not raid a dog breeding operation where the dogs exhibit signs of ill-health, then why will it raid a dog breeding operation where every dog is healthy?

Again we ask, Who gets raided, ruined, and criminalized.... and who doesn't? For what reasons?

If the law is enforced capriciously and arbitrarily, then no one is safe and no one can trust the law.

After fifty years of puppymillers being told by the SPCA that they were operating within the Act, suddenly, without being given any warning of new standards being expected, without being given any chance of making improvements, a chance that the Act says they must be given, the SPCA raided, ruined, and criminalized them. It did this with the TV and newspapers reporters in tow and it did it to the puppymills that AAS and Okanagan Animal Welfare had investigated and published on its web site and in its newsletter. Is This even legal?

We have no sympathy for poor puppy producers, but the honest way to have improved and controlled puppy producers in BC would have been to publicize the new interpretation of the Act, inspect all the producers, issue Offence Warning Notices where needed, and reinspect before making seizures. In view of the Alcatraz-like conditions of many SPCAs that cause extreme psychological suffering and even deadly physical disease, and where the SPCA's dog assessment tool was used to kill some dogs, some of the seized dogs would have been better off being left where they were and the producer made to make improvements.

But the ethical use of the PCA Act would not have attracted much media attention.

(See: What If Puppy Millers Could Afford Lawyers? http://www.animaladvocates.com/cgi-bin/newsroom.pl/read/3902