We can't fault the SPCA for lack of honesty, but we can fault the SPCA if it was not helpful and did not give the woman the names and numbers of other cat orgs or give her a handout about how to rehome your pet, or direct her to an SPCA web site on how to rehome your pet - if there is one, a quick search did not discover one.
Many people get pets just like they get other objects like pairs of shoes, and when the pets are no longer wanted, they dispose of them the same way they dispose of the shoes. No matter how much more "bad" it makes anyone feel to get rid of a pet than to get rid of old shoes, many people do it the same way: take them to the disposal place. For shoes, that is the dump or a charity thrift store. For pets, it is the SPCA for most people, and the SPCA is both the charity thrift store and the dump. The SPCA either resells them or takes their bodies to the dump for us. The SPCA made many millions of dollars by being BC's pet disposer for as long as one hundred years.
The SPCA erected an elaborate facade to hide what it was really doing. It called the facade "Animal Welfare". It haywired the facade together out of bits of photo ops for the media, bits of twisted philosophy, bits of "saints" doing a compassionate necessity that the rest of us are too weak to do, bits of "bad breeders", and bits of "irresponsible people who don't get their pets sterilized and who use the poor SPCA to get rid of their pets". But the SPCA didn't sterilize its animals, and the SPCA let their employees profit from breeding and the SPCA did not offer other suggestions to pet-dumpers because the business policy of the SPCA was to never turn down the offer of free product to sell, and the SPCA took on paid contracts to do what it did for free for the public, and the SPCA kept and killed in brutally inhumane ways. So it was all an elaborate lie.
The standard of animal welfare, the attitude to the disposability of pets, the standards of physical care of pets that the SPCA set in its own facilities, was the very lowest it could get away with, so low that it was actually committing offences under the PCA Act daily.
I am glad to notice that some improvement seems to be happening. It is an improvement for the SPCA to say "We will only kill the cats", over when it pretended it wouldn't. It is an improvement for the SPCA to tell pet dumpers not to dump their pet here. But it isn't possible to know the SPCA's motive for anything, so we can't say if this is an ethical policy improvement or just a reaction to a change in the way the business of animal welfare works - that the internet means no more getting away with mass killing and that there are so many better animal groups competing for the donation dollar that it's time to get out of the pet recyling business. The SPCA's 2005 Strategic Plan seems to indicate it is reducing its involvement in the pet recyling and disposal business, at least where it is losing money at it.
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