"Lorie Chortyk, spokeswoman for the B.C. SPCA, said the association has been deliberately working for four years to include psychological distress, as well as physical cruelty, as a legal basis for obtaining a warrant. "Psychological distress is just as bad," Chortyk said. Drever said it was the first time the B.C. SPCA has obtained a warrant from a justice of the peace to take legal custody of an animal based solely on the animal's psychological distress. Drever said two more pups were found in critical condition, but were able to be resuscitated.The surviving puppies have been in foster care and will all have homes when they are able to be separated from their mother, Drever said."

AAS comment: It would be useful to the thousands of people who see and hear chained dogs to be able to read the warrant to see if this precedent can be used to relieve the psychological suffering of those dogs, which for many of them, goes on year after sad year until the are killed or die. Did the warrant also name abandonment of the pups?

This precedent is the result of a change in public perception of cruelty to animals and we are glad that the SPCA is playing catch up and has begun "educating" prosecutors and justices of the peace after decades of doing exactly what the SPCA hopes to charge the puppies' owner with: separating mothers and pups, inflicting distress and disease in its psychologically cruel facilities, and often killing them all, mothers and pups. Signs of the times: The SPCA put the pups into foster care instead of into one of its facilities: The SPCA wants Crown to prosecute for psychological distress: The SPCA isn't going to kill the lot of them.

If only animal lovers could be sure that the SPCA's motives were animal-serving, not self-serving, these action would be unalloyed animal welfare, but the SPCA's history, even now, is to react to public pressure and loss of income, not to act from an animal-loving heart and an ethical mind. It just is not intelligent or responsible to trust the wrong motives. The only safe SPCA is one that is led by pure animal welfare ethics.