White hat, Black hat: Good cop - Bad cop. The SPCA shouldn't be both.

The SPCA needs to wear just one hat on its pointy little head - the white hat of animal welfare. But for money, millions of dollars a year, it dons the black hat of dog control. Wearing the black hat, it rounds up and kills "criminal" dogs. Sometimes the crime is real, a serious attack, but most of the time the crime is the innocent one of being stray or abandoned. Too bad - you do the crime, you do the time, and in this rough justice system, jail sentences sometimes end in capital punishment.

The SPCA claims that it takes on these contracts to control and dispose of dogs for humane reasons, but AAS disproved that easily by showing how the SPCA just ran a bottom-line dog disposal business for decades, killing all the unsellable to save money. Our web site has many pages of evidence.

As a result, the SPCA has been forced to do business in a more acceptable way, and to that end there have been some slight improvements, but given the SPCA penchant for one-shot grandstanding fundraising photo-ops, it's hard to know if this is real change or just mugging for the cameras.

Even the best-intentioned dog control agency must do things that are the antithesis of animal welfare, such as preventing dogs from having fun in the wrong park, and demanding payment for licences. Then there is the legal requirement for the dog control agency to hassle nice old ladies and their nice old dogs. And more darkly, the legal requirement to seize dogs that are alleged to have done something dangerous and hold them in their Alcatraz-like prisons and then kill them.

This job cannot be done honestly by any agency claiming to do animal welfare - it has to be lied about and hidden as much as possible and that is what AAS proved the SPCA did for decades. The SPCA can only wash its hands of the blood of so many dogs if it stops being the taxpayer-paid dog catcher.

Who should wear the black hat of dog control if not the SPCA? Best choice is for municipalities to hire their own staff and run their own pounds. Bad choice is another dog control contractor, one just like the SPCA, and maybe worse.

In either case, the SPCA must have the PCA Act include humane standards for pounds and then it must inspect all pounds and respond to complaints of cruelty at pounds, even seizing and prosecuting.

But of course it can't - not while its own facilities are so inhumane and some of its treatment of the animals in its facilities is flagrantly against the law (the PCA Act), by causing critical distress (death).