After decades of telling puppymillers they were operating legally, suddenly the SPCA began seizing their dogs, always with the media in tow. It made public monsters of their old partners; it crushed and criminalized them; it took all their assets, even their homes; it got millions of dollars in donations for appearing to be "heroically rescuing" the dogs; it sold their dogs; it killed their dogs (after the media's attention had moved on).

Some owners who paid the SPCA's wildly inflated "seizure costs" got back the animals the SPCA had "heroically rescued", after telling the media and the public how severely abused the animals had been.

It made these seizures without doing three things:

1. It did not advise puppymillers what it now defined the legal offence of causing distress in the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act (the PCA Act)as. Not only had the SPCA told puppymillers that a repeated lack of food, water and shelter was not an offence worth prosecuting, but it had never even told them what " abuse, neglect, and suffering" in the PCA Act was. It should have advised all puppymillers of its new definition by contacting them, by press releases, by ads in papers.

2. In some cases, it did not give the alleged abuser an Offence Warning Notice which the PCA Act requires it to do before seizing animals. It broke the law itself.

3. It did not first provide a facility where it could properly care for the animals it "heroically rescued". It put them in disease-filled facilities where some died of diseases contracted there; it did not provide proper rehabilitation, killing many for allegedly being "unadoptable" (even though other rescue groups and volunteers knew the dogs only needed some love and time and begged to be given them to spare their lives); it did not provide proper vet care, again killing some for being ill; it did not provide proper socialization, moving dogs suddenly from a hell that they were used to, to a hell that was strange and frightening; they put intact males and females into the same cells then sold the puppies that resulted.

AAS begged Daniell to please stop his branch staff from killing any animal that had been "rescued" by the SPCA at his direction. We pointed out how immoral it was to seize dogs and then kill them for being hard to sell or expensive to fix. We were ignored - and worse - Daniell called the killing "acceptable collateral damage".
Our proof is at:

http://www.animaladvocates.com/beaverdell-topaz.htm,

http://www.animaladvocates.com/spca-Alcatrazes.htm,

http://www.animaladvocates.com/SPCA-kamloops-puppymill.htm,

http://www.animaladvocates.com/Watchdog/PrisonCampForAnimals.htm

http://www.animaladvocates.com/Watchdog/ChilliwackPuppymill.htm

and many other pages on our web site.