There is certainly good intent on the part of animal groups that put homeless animals on display in malls and in store fronts, but pedalling faster also keeps the wheel of abandonment turning. If it's easy to get - then get they will. And if it's easy to abandon, then abandon they will.

Standards cannot be raised by lowering them; all that can do is preserve low standards. Animal welfarists should be striving to raise public standards by the example of their own standards. Imagine if orphans were put on display at a mall with the excuse given that more orphans got homes that way. Putting goods prominently on display attracts "impulse buyers", a well-known marketing devise.

This is treating animals like product, no matter how many animal welfarists don't understand that. The message to the public is, at best, a mixed message. It sees the animal welfare message that there are homeless animals, but it also sees the animals on display in a mall. How can treating animals like product teach that animals are sentient beings with the own needs that are not our needs and never should be our needs? If animal welfarists don't teach that, then there is no hope that animals will ever be more than our helpless possessions.

For decades, the SPCA waxed fat by treating animals like product - cheap second-hand product at that. It got free product delivered to its doors every day. In a tiny place like Nelson, apparently still over two a day. Since the product was free and more arrived all day (in fact, SPCA policy was and is to never turn a person down who wants to get rid of their pet, and even the SPCA has said over and over that there are more animals than homes, even bad homes), logic leads inescapably to the only thing the SPCA could do, and that was to kill all the unsellable. If they hadn't, every SPCA would have filled up in one or two days. In fact, this very thing happened the day after the SPCA announced its "moratorium on killing for space" in 2002 after being humiliated on TV with the exposing by volunteers of how it had killed a lot of nice dogs. http://www.animaladvocates.com/bcspca/moratorium.htm

So the SPCA killed anything that looked unsellable: old, sick, big, homely; even killing kittens and pups in "kitten and puppy season". The Nelson SPCA has a better reputation than most SPCAs, possibly largely because it doesn't have a "shelter" of grim cells and little cages, staffed with surly animal disposers. The overwhelming reason given by the public for not liking or trusting the SPCA and why the SPCA's reputation has been under fire for so long, is the SPCA's "shelters", especially those that have dog-catcher contracts and are staffed with dog-catcher employees.

Animals in malls are one way of "moving product", and if the goal is to race ahead of supply, then peddling animals in malls is one way to do that. This message may not be intentional, but it is part of the message when animals are displayed like goods.

Shouldn't the primary goal of animal welfare be to reduce the number of animals needing homes? The work of many animal welfare groups is to save a few selected animals a year, whose stories they use to raise money to save a few more. The few animals saved a year are lucky, and the hundred thousand not saved are out of luck.

How many animal welfare groups spend money on community spay/neuter? Decade after decade the SPCA has professed, in heart-warming media stories, to be baffled by "all the kittens this year", indicating that it thinks its share of community spay/neuter is too little to have made a difference. In fact, the groups who for decades have done millions of dollars of community spay neuter, with no P.R., have shouldered this burden, and now that there are thousands fewer kittens in kitten season, it is they who deserve the credit.

In Prince George, where the SPCA has admitted to still killing 80% of the cats it accepts into its "care", the SPCA opened a low-cost spay/neuter clinic last summer so that it can, at the least, stop selling sexually intact cats and dogs, and it is also doing public spay/neuter though we don't know if it put the usual impediments in the way of the poor, the ones whose animals are doing almost 100% of the casual breeding. The clinic is a real step in the right direction and sends the right message. If the SPCA spent as freely on spay/neuter as it spends on lawyers it might actually be able to "care" for every animal it takes, as real animal rescuers and welfarists do.