The BC SPCA might argue that its policies and practices were the commonly held norms in animal welfare.

They were the norms in the pet disposal/animal control industry that has masqueraded as animal welfare for the last 100 years, but they were never the norms in real animal welfare. In fact, the industry members, as in all businesses, watch each other and copy what works for the bottom line.

When there was money to be made in protecting people from dogs (the antithesis of protecting dogs from people), they all got into the dog-catcher/disposer contracting business. When puppymills - and why they were not being charged with cruelty - started to be questioned by the mainstream media, suddenly they all started to make puppymill seizures (after 40 years of knowing of and ignoring puppymills like the one in the Okanagan pictured below). The latest industry buzz word became "Animal Protection" (with cameras rolling).

Many uninformed animal-lovers in BC bought the industry's version of animal welfare because it was so heavily promoted by the SPCA. But many informed animal-lovers hated that version for many decades, but they lacked the money to woo the media as the SPCA was able to, and so their voices were ignored.

The BC SPCA was one of the biggest members of the "animal welfare" business in North America because of the sheer size of the area it covered. It simply isn't credible that it did not ever read the hundred years of scholarly research, the academic articles, the whole body of writing that pointed out that animal disposal was immoral and was not animal welfare. Right at the Vancouver Sun, Nicholas Read wrote on the subject repeatedly for many years.