Like a palisade of thick planks, the SPCA surrounds itself with a thousand "Little Women". They mean well, but no matter how long they labour for the SPCA, they remain ethically challenged.

These "nice" little enablers are the happy faces of the SPCA. Many personally choose a few animals a year to save from the SPCA, seemingly not noticing that animals should not need saving from the SPCA, and wouldn't if the SPCA itself were ethical.

Taking in so many animals that some suffer from neglect and are killed or have to be "rescued" is not animal welfare. To do this for decades without doing anything to fix the problem of pet abandonment - in fact to capitalize on the problem as the SPCA constantly does with promos like Home for the Holidays and importing puppies to sell - is plainly unethical. This is not a complicated ethical question.

But it is too complicated for the people the SPCA likes to surround itself with.

Even women who are or have been in positions of ultimate power at the BC SPCA, members of the Board of Directors, seem frighteningly devoid of comprehension. One recently noted that in her area the feral cat problem seems to be much improved and wondered if that had anything to do with the decades of unpaid, hard, grinding, dedicated work of a little cat rescue group. This group had done everything the SPCA didn't do. It would not kill. It set up feeding stations. It sterilized all its animals. It won the respect and the assistance of local vets. It paid its bills. Meanwhile, the SPCA had killed feral cats for years. After all her years with the SPCA she was still wondering what works.

The SPCA could have chosen to follow the example of real animal welfare groups and spay/neuter, educate, trap/neuter/release and maintain, limit intake to the number of animals that it had the resources for instead of intaking everything and killing the excess, and to spend more money on all these things and less on salaries and wages and vehicles, travel, P.R. and perks. Instead the SPCA chose the "Pet Disposal/Recycling" business and let hundreds of little groups do the real animal welfare while it got almost all the money.

It appears from recent promotions that the SPCA is not going to choose ethics or people who understand the ethics of animal welfare anytime soon. And the pom-pom girls will go on cheering and getting pretty ribbons.