The BC SPCA, famously, for decades, did no dog or cat vaccinations at all. The result was disease-ridden facilities and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of helpless abandoned animals made sick by the SPCA and then killed for being sick. What survived was sold, to anyone - as long as they paid. Animals were sold intact (breedable) if not previously sterilized, and sold sick if they could be. They were sold without even a pretence of animal welfare - without the least need to hide that they were just the SPCA's "product" in its pet recycling business because the SPCA's p.r. machinery so efficiently hid everything from donators. The product was actually delivered free to the SPCA's door, hundreds or thousands a day, so there was no need to make any "damaged goods" more sellable by vet care, or vaccinating, or sterilizing, or rehabilitating and training. All of that would have cost money and why bother when more free product was being dragged or carried through its doors hourly? The only other business that gets free product and ditches the unsellable is the junk business - and that is just what the SPCA dealt in - junked animals.

Because of the damage done to its bottom line by the exposure and criticism by AAS and others, the SPCA began doing damage control, and recently began pre-sales sterilizing (in a few branches) and vaccinating.

But the way it is vaccinating is just more proof that it is still not doing real animal welfare. The SPCA went from vaccinating nothing to vaccinating everything, with the same lack of concern for the health or welfare of the animals in its clutches (and we use that word advisedly as it is still the most accurate word to describe the way animals are kept and used by the SPCA), as it always did. Vaccinating is just the new way of doing its old pet recycling business. Re-imaging, not reforming.

The Surrey SPCA is the latest case in point but this story is endemic to SPCAs. Six dogs at the Surrey SPCA contracted kennel cough recently and were killed. SPCAs are full of diseases preventable by standard cleaning and isolation practices and killing the ones with the bad luck to both be abandoned and to wind up in an SPCA "shelter" is bad enough. But the SPCA kills even more dogs, and we presume cats too, by now vaccinating all animals, sick or well, willy-nilly.