SPCA policies are changing fast enough to make your head spin. For 30 years at least the SPCA piously said that Christmas was a bad time to get a new pet. Everyone too busy, too much stress, too much noise, no time to devote to the new pet. For once, the SPCA was right. Now the Nanaimo SPCA says the SPCA has always been wrong, that Christmas is a great time to get a new pet.

The Nanaimo SPCA is ignoring the known pitfall of people who want a cheap toy for their kids; something that every real animal welfarist is only too sadly aware of as we are all asked every year in December for kittens or pups or even cats and dogs for "my boyfriend, my girlfriend, my son, my daughter, my mother all alone in an apartment", etc.

Why would the Nanaimo SPCA do that? Of course, there are good homes to be found at Christmas, but the screening has to be even more thorough and many people have to be declined. Does the Nanaimo SPCA thoroughly screen new homes? Not long ago, the Nanaimo SPCA admitted that it did not even do home checks for dogs and that it had sold a dog to a person who told the SPCA he had no fence and the dog would be kept on a cable.

To us, this smacks of the SPCA's other promotions in the media to "move product".