AAS has never wanted the SPCA to fracture this way. The SPCA accuses us of being "hell-bent on destroying" it, but we can prove that every one of our words and actions has been to preserve the SPCA.

For six months, from November 2003 to April 2004, we defended Craig Daniell's cover-up of egregious corruption and cruelty by employees because we wanted to give him a chance to clean the SPCA up. To expose what we knew would only have weakened the SPCA . We told Mr Daniell, at that time the new Manager of Cruelty Investigations, that we wanted a financially strong SPCA so that he had the money to start to prevent cruelty.

We begged the SPCA, beginning five years ago, to reform or it would collapse. It was so flagrantly corrupt and there was a growing body of astute and connected critics that were not going to go away and that only honest animal welfare could save it.

By our charge of corruption we meant ethical corruption, but the corruption that the media and the public can easily understand is financial corruption and that was exposed within months of AAS beating off threats by SPCA lawyers, who tried to scare us into removing references to corruption from our web site, by the revelation of the Vancouver SPCA's CEO's $204,000 secret salary.

The release of the Community Consultation Report in November 2001 was a moment in time when the SPCA could have chosen to straighten up and fly right, but it chose to overlay the status quo with bigger and better P.R. and more money spent on the fact cats at the top, instead of better animal welfare.

And since November 2003, when it ramped up the PCA Act and began making media-attending seizures, in the process inflicting distress and cruelty on many of the seized animals, the SPCA has worsened.

I think there is still a bit of time for it to save itself but it will take vision and imagination and there appears to be none of that at the SPCA.