'A few years ago, Tanya Firmage was managing an animal shelter in Brockville Ontario, when one morning, staff arrived to see the shelter broken into. During the night, someone had come in through a front window, rummaged the office, and released 19 dogs out the back door. They were loose and the alarm had not sounded. But there was a second surprise at the back door. 18 Dogs. "It was quite amazing because they were just there waiting to be let in," said Firmage, Surrey SPCA's new branch manager. "(The shelter was) a home. It was a place not to fear."'

This is not as amazing as Ms Firmage thought. People who know dogs know that dogs will return to the chain, to the pen, to the people who have neglected, even abused them. Does Ms Firmage not know that about dogs? The Brockville shelter was none of those terrible things of course, but that the dogs were all at the door is not as significant as it is made to seem by that nice little story.

'The Surrey shelter adheres to the B.C. SPCA's no-kill policy, in place since the mid-1990.'

Even the SPCA has been careful not to claim to be no-kill, so perhaps the reporter just made that up and is not quoting Ms Firmage. In March of 2002, after being hammered in the media when Vancouver SPCA volunteers went to the media to expose all the killing of dogs to make room for more dogs coming in, in a transparent attempt at damage control, the BC SPCA announced a moratorium on killing for space. Even that was not true, as the SPCA was outed for killing for space over and over and finally had to admit it still was. So no-kill is totally false, especially when one understands what is meant by Ms Firmage's words, "The only exceptions are animals that are very sick or aggressive." The SPCA will kill a cat for having a cold and kill a dog for failing its test. That is a very long way away from no-kill indeed. Again, perhaps the reporter has misquoted Ms Firmage.

The changes Ms Firmage envisions are all to be desired and we hope to see them realized shortly. But they are made harder to achieve by the fact that her branch has a paid contract with the City of Surrey to round up and dispose of stray dogs and to kill dogs it deems dangerous.