This is the tip of a huge iceberg of evil. It is about the expanding, multi-billion dollar pet industry in caged and exotic animals and about those who sell them as gimmicks to people who will dump them or let them die of neglect.

The BC SPCA cannot absolutely stop the market in pets because the consumer demands them and what consumers demand will be supplied either legally or illegally.

The SPCA's role should be to discourage the market in exotic pets with constant advertising and public statements just as government has successfully discouraged cigarette smoking. It can use the PCA act to seize exotic pets in stores that are housing them inhumanely (almost all) and it can seize pets from owners who are slowly letting them die. It has seized from one of the worst suppliers but it needs to seize from pet stores and consumer/owners too.

Just swooping down on the worst is only part of the solution. No owner of an exotic animal that is slowly dying in its cage relates their actions to the extreme cases of exotics neglect. The SPCA needs to educate against owing exotic animals, instead of endorsing the owning of exotic pets with brochures that purport to tell people how to take care of them and infrequent forays into schools with rabbits and hamsters in cages which only show children that the SPCA approves of keeping animals in cages. The SPCA does not object publicly enough to owning exotics, so the public perception is that there can be nothing wrong with owning exotics. We have not seen one SPCA ad that says that owning exotics is wrong. Not one ad that says keeping a pet in a cage is wrong. The SPCA itself resells caged animals.