Beginning with the revelation in 2001 that one SPCA manager was making over $204,000 a year, the SPCA has been losing its market to hundreds of small animal welfare groups who not only spend almost every cent of their donations on direct animal welfare but do so without killing hundreds of thousands of animals.

Instead of copying the marketing that was working - real no-kill animal welfare - the SPCA turned to its unfettered police powers to try to shut down the competition. These are the powers that permit the SPCA to prevent suffering which the SPCA ignored for almost a decade. When it did decide to take a look at how these powers could be used, it chose to use them to injure people and animals and to "get" the competition.

The most infamous case was the raid on Forgotten Felines cat shelter in Richmond where the SPCA went after founder Penny March after March had had a lot of good P.R., even though some of the cats at the Forgotten Felines shelter had been given to March by the SPCA because they were sick and the SPCA would not treat them, but would just summarily kill them: http://www.animaladvocates.com/top-stories/ForgottenFelines.htm

We can see that the temptation to use the powers given to it by a gullible legislature in 1994 must be very great, and so it has proven. The SPCA has been using these powers to act like the Gestapo in BC. It has terrified and intimidated people and unlawfully seized animals. AAS does not use words like Gestapo lightly given that the SPCA is suing us in Supreme Court over some of the words on this site, but we have read the word used in newspapers to describe abuse far milder than what we can prove of the SPCA, and so "Gestapo" can be added to the list of words that the SPCA's lawyers will fulminate and fume and froth over. We have a Supreme Court Justice who found that an SPCA seizure was illegal, and we have the photos that prove that one of the seized horses was returned in shocking condition, and we have transcripts of SPCA kangaroo-court trials that show the SPCA in its true light, and we have video of seizures that prove the SPCA is seizing healthy animals - against the express provisions of the law. The SPCA went from simply abusing animals to abusing people and animals. Read the warnings some MLAs sounded in 1994 about giving the SPCA so much power: http://www.animaladvocates.com/seizures/hansard.htm

It's a bit of a marketing no-brainer. After decades of expanding its pet disposal businesses all over BC, and creating a business empire that had to be staffed with the kind of surly, uneducated people who will take a paycheque to kill healthy, innocent animals, the bubble burst and the truth caught up to it - and bit it - hard! Since the SPCA began shooting itself in public, it no longer has a monopoly. Real animal welfare moved into the void that the public recognized. And now the SPCA is in serious financial danger.

What a pity that the directing brains of the BC SPCA don't seem to see the obvious. All the SPCA had to do was to co-opt real animal welfare. But to do that it had to drop its killing and pet disposal contracts. It has chosen to fight for its pet disposal contracts and to continue with mass killings.

Seizure of John van Dongen's horses found "illegal" and "unlawful" http://www.animaladvocates.com/seizures/j.vandongen.htm
The PCA Act and legal opinion: http://www.animaladvocates.com/seizures/index.htm