This may not be the great news it appears to be. It is just as likely to be an attempt to recover lost market share and to eliminate the competition.

For decades, but over the last ten years in particular, all the big animal welfare businesses have lost an increasing amount of money to real animal welfarists. In BC we estimate the BC SPCA has lost over a million dollars.

After decades of near-monopoly of the pet welfare market, the SPCA has suffered badly from the good P.R. these groups get and the bad P.R. it has been getting. The ethics of animal welfare were successfully distorted by the SPCA for at least fifty years by the SPCA calling its prisons "shelters", its killing of thousands of healthy excess animals "euthanasia", and the killing of every feral cat "compassion". The media and the public were fooled by those P.R. tactics for a long time, but increasingly less so.

Big business animal welfare is only doing what any business does when it is losing money. It tries to take over the competition. The large corporation swallows the small one that was siphoning off profits.

When the take-over is complete, it is business as usual. The P.R. will change, as the BC SPCA was forced to change its official feral cat policy that said all of them were to be killed immediately, but the same people who killed so many animals are still in charge. The only thing that can blunt the process of business as usual is the internet watching.

The BC SPCA has much more power to protect its markets than HSUS does. The BC SPCA has the power of the PCA Act and it is using it to shut down the competition as well as using its access to the media to slander and libel the competition, as it did last week when it defamed Bev Parent by calling her a "hoarder" as she lay dying in hospital after trying to save the cats she rescued from the street. The SPCA would have killed many if not most of these cats, had they ended up at an SPCA. It also used the fear of its animal police against Bev last year as it has with so many competing cat groups who are spaying and neutering and giving vet care to all their cats, unlike the SPCA. These groups make the SPCA look bad by comparison.

Permanent change can happen, but only if there is a watchdog. For humans, the watchdog is a free, unfettered media. For animals, the watchdog is the internet.