I met with Craig Daniell shortly after he was hired to be the BC SPCA's Manager of Cruelty Investigations in November 2002. At that time both Mr Daniell and I thought we were on the same page. He was going to shut down the puppymillers which AAS had exposed on its web site. But we did not just expose the puppymills - anyone could do that - we also exposed how the SPCA partnered with the puppymillers, helping to keep them in business for so long, deflecting complaints and selling some of the product.

What Mr Daniell may not have realized is that AAS's goal has always been an honest SPCA, and getting rid of puppymillers was incidental to that goal. When I found out that honesty was still not an SPCA goal, Mr Daniell and I and parted company. When Mr Daniell was promoted to CEO and got his hands on power in May 2004, he started the Supreme Court action to silence me a few months later.

Mr Daniell's documented modus operandi is to hit back hard if challenged. If his target is weak (and they usually are) he has been successful. That includes animals as well as humans. His bully tactic against me was to include some AAS Directors who had never posted and some AAS posters in the action. If the government had not repealed BC's anti-Slap Suit legislation, this suit would have been so dangerous to the SPCA that perhaps saner counsel would have prevailed and the action would not have been started. Former BC SPCA president, Rick Sargent, obtained expert opinion that such an action would be disastrous for the SPCA, but once he and Douglas Brimacombe, the previous CEO, were gone, Daniell's tactics prevailed and the action was started. The SPCA cannot win it no matter how much "animals' money" it spends. Even if it were to win on a technicality, all the decades of dirt will be on the public record. And this is the self-destroying tactic that the Members of the Board of Directors of the SPCA support. Even AAS does not want the destruction of the BC SPCA.