Parksville SPCA volunteer Lyn MacDonald knows that cats were killed for becoming "aggressive" after spending months in cages so small that they could barely move, but it's possible that the Parksville SPCA accepted most of the 68 cats it killed for "aggression" from people who brought in feral cats. If it did this, it did it knowing that it would kill them, as it told Diane Esther it would.

In her post, Diane asked a very important question: "Why has the SPCA taken the position that it has a duty to protect the public from "aggressive" cats?"

If not in the SPCA's mind, at least in the minds of animal rescuers and many animal-lovers, it is a conflict for an animal-welfare and protection society, mandated to protect animals from people, to act as a protector of humans from animals. It is especially a conflict to be the killers of seized animals, such as the roosters seized recently, and of many seized dogs and cats and livestock. It is a humane society's mandate to save animals, not kill them. It can't logically be for an animal's welfare to kill it unless the animal is suffering irredeemably.

Who should be killing society's unwanted pets? AAS has said from the beginning that it should not be any "humane" society. It should be municipal animal control agencies, using taxpayer's money - not donations from animal-lovers, accountable to the taxpayers - not hidden from scrutiny and accountability through Freedom of Information access as the SPCA is.

How many animals has the SPCA killed in the last fifty years? In the last ten years? How many has it killed in 2006 or 2007? It has been asked these questions but claims it doesn't have the statistics. Yet the Parksville SPCA published statistics.

The muddle in the public's mind about whether it is real animal-welfare to kill unwanted, excess pets, to kill nuisance animals like feral cats, to kill dangerous animals like some dogs, to kill animals seized to "protect them from cruelty", is caused by all these conflicts. Until the conflicts are resolved honestly, questions will dog the BC SPCA.