This news story exposes perfectly how dog control agencies are passing themselves off as animal protecting agencies, and the ethical swamp they are falling into because of that.

This story makes it perfectly clear that the Langley Animal Protection Society (LAPS) is actually a People Protection law agency. LAPS is trying - and succeeding by all accounts that we receive - to be the best dog pound it can be, given that municipalities never give animal control nearly enough money, and we congratulate them for that.

Poundkeepers have been universally reviled for hundreds of years, but no one questioned that they had to protect humans from dangerous or loose dogs and that the dogs would be killed if not claimed.

The animal rights movement changed all that in the last few decades and people started to hate pounds for the killing they did. Some pounds responded by starting to combine humane treatment of the dogs in their charge (volunteers for walking, grooming and training) with better attempts to find new owners. But the basic reason for the existence of pounds could not change because of the legal duty to protect the public from dogs, and they had to go on killing dangerous or unsellable dogs. Many volunteers were horrified: they had believed that "their nice pound" wouldn't do that. Many volunteers couldn't go back after one of their favourites was killed on some specious ground given to hide the fact that the dog was killed because it was unlikely to sell and likely to go on taking up space and money for a long time, if not forever.

Dog pounds that are better than old-fashioned dog jails, that have volunteer programs, and that try hard not to kill dogs, should just be honest and call themselves Humane Dog Control. LAPS could have named itself Langley Humane Animal Control. That's an honest name. The City of Vancouver pound jumped on the animal welfare bandwagon by renaming itself the Vancouver Animal Shelter. Now that is really dishonest. The Vancouver City pound only impounds dogs - not "animals", and it does not "shelter" anything. No intelligent person can honestly call a concrete cell where the inmates might be killed because they have not been sold, or because they have acted badly, or to make room for more inmates, a "shelter".

No one wants to admit to being the hated dog-catcher. But that is what they all must be. Someone has to be: lawmakers are obliged to protect the public. And some choose to be the dog-catcher because there is money to make at it, if the facilities are run cheaply enough. That is the BC SPCA. Any SPCA with a dog-catching contract is doing dog control. And dog control is bottom-line driven, whereas animal welfare is compassion-driven.