How can it be called animal welfare, or even an adoption, when a dog the agency has sold has serious behaviour problems and the agency tells the owners that they will not take back the dog and advises the owner to kill the dog?

The short answer is that this is not animal welfare and the adoption was not an adoption, it was a sale.

AAS is frequently appealed to by people who have purchased a dog from an SPCA who are desperate for help and advise. In the cases we have been told of in the last month, the SPCA in question did not offer any advise except to kill the dog.

One dog has bitten a child, another pinned his owner to the floor and growled, another bit the hands of three people. There was an admission by one of the SPCAs that the "scientific test" the SPCA boasts of (that the dog had passed) doesn't work and has to be improved. The SPCA's test is designed to weed out any dogs the SPCA intakes under its policy of unlimited surrender that might be an insurance liability to the SPCA and even though it is rigged to fail dogs for behaviours that any qualified dog trainer would understand are correctible, many dogs that need behaviour modification before being rehomed are sold with serious problems unaddressed.

Hundred pound dogs with no training are sold by the SPCA to women with no experience. One of those dogs was killed by the distraught owner when the SPCA refused to take it back and offered no assistance. Most of the dogs are hurriedly taken on by the real animals welfarists in BC, all the little groups who survive on garage sales.

It is not animal welfare to intake more animals than there are resources allocated for their welfare. It is not animal welfare to sell dogs before they have been rehabilitated. It is not animal welfare to refuse to help a dog that has been sold complete with dangerous behaviours. It is not animal welfare to intake desirable, sellable dogs while shutting the door on a dog that has been sold, that you don't want back.

In the past, the SPCA did take every dog back and just sold it again or killed it. That is how the pet disposal/shuffling business works.

But the huge increase in real animal welfare groups all connected by the internet made it possible for the SPCA to off-load its responsibility onto these groups and to decrease all its killing that was being exposed.

When the agency refuses to rehabilitate one of its products (the name the SPCA has used for the animals in its "care"), then it is still just running a pet disposal/shuffling business - just in a more acceptable style.