Animal Advocates Watchdog

AAS trusted and defended Craig Daniell until the Graham seizure *LINK* *PIC*

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. But the scales were dropped from our eyes when in April 2004, Mr Daniell hammered small-scale Lhasa apso breeders, Ron and Heather Graham of Port Alberni, to a pulp. The Graham's dogs were all healthy, lived inside the house with the Grahams, produced one or two litters a year and had won over 500 ribbons. Craig Daniell is responsible for the financial ruin, the psychologically-destroying public vilification, and the ruin of the Grahams' lives. The buck stops with him.

He permitted the juxtaposition of photos of severely neglected dogs with press releases about the Grahams. He permitted TV to do the same. He allowed the media to attend the seizure. He allowed the Port Alberni to put the Grahams' dogs into its chronically diseased pound where two of the pups died of SPCA contracted parvo. He allowed the Grahams to be criminalized in court and disgraced in their community. He tried to sue the Grahams, whose only asset is their home, for over $100,000. And just what was the dreadful cruelty the Grahams were destroyed for? The Grahams kept some of their dogs in crates overnight (while some slept on their bed), and put dogs in crates when visitors and clients came so that the noise wasn't deafening. Millions of people put small dogs into crates to sleep, and the SPCA keeps dogs and cats in "crates" 24/7 for months. But it made great TV because the SPCA raid caught Heather in bed and some of the crates still soiled. When Heather tried to let the dogs out to relieve themselves and to bathe any that had soiled overnight, as she did every morning, the SPCA stopped her. With the house full of noisy strangers, and locked into their crates for hours, all the dogs soiled themselves, and then the SPCA took photos of that and used the photos to convict the Grahams of cruelty and demonize them in the media.

Healthy pups eating high-quality food until the SPCA seized them and infected them with parvo virus, killing two of them....

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