"Animal advocates have scored a coup in a settlement that makes it tougher for Los Angeles County's six shelters to euthanize cats and dogs, potentially saving the lives of thousands a year."

The use of the word "shelter" to describe places that kill thousands of the "sheltered" a year helps to entrench the belief that these places and the agencies that run them are somehow just misunderstood animal-lovers.

If that were true, why does it need real animal-lovers, using laws, to force the "sheltering industry" to do what it could have done itself, not waiting until forced to?

Defining allowable reasons for killing "shelter animals"

"The settlement resolved a year-old suit alleging that to eliminate overcrowding at the shelters the county used a legal loophole to rapidly dispose of adoptable pets by deeming them "irremediably suffering."

"Overcrowding" is one of the standard reasons to kill in the pet disposal industry.

Ah... the old tried and true, to quote Craig Daniell, the CEO of the BC SPCA, who in a February 2008 Vancouver Sun "Sound Off" piece, made the statement, 'When the SPCA must euthanize an animal, it is for the same reason so-called "no-kill" facilities euthanize animals — to end the suffering of an animal that is beyond medical help.'

What actual conditions does the animal-welfare BC SPCA, call "beyond medical help"?

AAS has the list of 56 reasons that the SPCA kills animal for and it doesn't look to us like any list that real animal welfarists would have.

It looks like making the BC SPCA limit the reasons it can kill animals is one more campaign that animal advocates in BC will be forced to take on, just as animal advocates in Los Angeles had to.