Andyfreeze, Harbinger, and Kathi Travers. Who are they?

We can't tell who the persons are who signed their comments with the aliases Andyfreeze and Harbinger, but Kathi Travers, who wrote the article on The Voice of the North site ( http://www.opinion250.com/blog/view/9448/1/special+spca+constable ), is a current and long-time Director of the BC SPCA. (http://www.spca.bc.ca/about/BOD.asp) Perhaps she wrote that she is more than a disinterested SPCA fan and the site administrators at The Voice of the North (if there are any administrators) removed that acknowledgement.

As Ms Travers writes, $71,000 is the sum (and indeed, it is paltry) that the BC government pays for training of the SPCA Special Provincial Constables who enforce the PCA Act, but, just in case a reader were to think that this is the only money the SPCA is given by government, it isn't. The SPCA gets many millions in gaming funds and from municipal pound contracts. These are contracts to impound and dispose of unclaimed dogs and dogs deemed dangerous, frequently by the SPCA itself and less frequently by a court.

Sometimes the contracts the SPCA holds also cover the enforcement of a municipality's animal control laws and sometimes enforcement is done by the municipality's bylaw enforcement employees.

Ms Travers wrote: "The animal control officer’s job is to protect the public from the animals. The special constable’s job is to protect the animals from the public." We couldn't have said it better ourselves; in fact, since we first began posting comment on AAS about the SPCA eight years ago, we have said many times that for the SPCA to hold paid public protection contracts conflicts ethically with its mandate to protect animals from people.