AAS has rehabilitated dogs that would not have scored well on any of the CAMP test's steps. But it has taken up to three years - in home settings - to rehabilitate them. There are only a very few dedicated individuals who are willing or have the right personality to do this. How can any organization afford to do this on the scale the SPCA's policies of pound contracting and open surrender necessitates? The failure is not in the CAMP tests, but in SPCA policy that results in jammed facilities.

And here we get to the heart of the matter. Should the SPCA be society's dog-disposer?

If yes, then should the SPCA be doing it on such a large scale that there will need to be a lot of killing and employees who see killing as a reasonable solution? Some percentage of dogs in SPCAs will fail these tests and the greater the number of dogs taken into the SPCA the greater the number that will fail and will have to be killed.

AAS argued from the beginning that it is corrupting to be in the dog-disposal business and we proved that indeed the SPCA was corrupted. As currently constituted (pound contracts and an open surrender policy), the SPCA has a high volume of dogs to dispose of. Because of the exposure on television of the Vancouver SPCA's killing of six nice dogs for space, in February of this year, which the SPCA tried to justify on the grounds that the dogs were aggressive, the SPCA has had to put a system into place that justifies to the public and to the media all future killings - so that this kind of negative publicity, which results in an immediate loss of donations, will never happen again. Hence "science based" temperament testing protocols that legitimise the "aggressive" label, headed by Nadine Gourkow, a "scientist" with university degrees to legitimise the process.

From information we have received, we don't believe Gourkow understands dogs (she is a cat specialist and only recently became the owner of a dog - one nice dog). But a person who understands dogs is not what the SPCA needed, in fact a person with many years experience in dog rehabilitation was just what the SPCA did not want. That person would be able to see how a dog could be rehabilitated if only it were given enough time, or enough money were spent on it, things the SPCA does not have. It does not have enough time or money because the business of disposing of society's dogs creates a volume of dogs too great to give dogs the individual help that would save them. Even if the BC SPCA stopped paying it's executive staff such high salaries, stopped paying for trips to England and retreats to Harrison Hot Springs, stopped expanding its head office staff from ten to over thirty, it still would not have enough money to give true "shelter" to all the dogs it has contracted to dispose of.

The SPCA needed a person who is familiar with scientific jargon who would appease the media and keep it from ever again exposing the SPCA the way it did in February. The SPCA needed a "team player" loyal to the bosses. A person with years of real, hands-on experience in dog rehabilitation may have balked at the underlying hypocrisy of the temperament testing, seeing that it is a "tool", not to save dog's lives, but to save the SPCA from the loss of donations that public exposure of killing causes.

From what we have been told the temperament tests are being used in some instances to get rid of dogs that are merely "difficult to sell". This is no different than what the SPCA has always done, except it used to do it without fear of exposure or censure. Now it is done from the safety of "scientific protocols". And from what we have been told, the orders to kill dogs are being given by novices with only a few days training.

Nadine Gourkow said in an interview on CBC radio, September 19th, that "science has taught new things about animal behaviour". This is media-friendly, junk- science babble. It could only teach something new to someone who knew nothing.

AAS read the first temperament testing protocol, the one the SPCA hurriedly put into place in March in a frantic attempt to counter the deadly publicity of the six dogs-killing in February. This method was not "scientifically validated" but it had to do until Gourkow could receive accreditation from the RSPCA in England for its testing system.

AAS thought then that the SPCA putting in place a system to justify killing could only mean that the SPCA intends to go on disposing of the majority of unwanted dogs in BC for some time.

The dog-disposal business is corrupting - if it is done by anyone who is also in the animal welfare business. The line between the two, animal welfare and animal disposal, must be blurred for donations from animal-lovers to keep coming in. Dog-disposal done by pounds is nasty, brutish, and cruel, but it is also open and straightforward. Pounds kill because there are more dogs than homes, more product than purchasers. So do SPCA pounds, but the SPCA has deliberately hidden this to protect its donation income. Only by refusing to do this, under any guise, including the guise of science, will the SPCA be in a position to educate the public as to why so many dogs are disposed of. But it can't possibly risk doing that while claiming to be saving animals (animal welfare) and also doing animal-disposing (animal control contracts). And it appears from the use of the "justification tool" that the SPCA intends to go on being society's primary dog-disposer.

Who should be killing society's unwanted dogs?

We think it should be municipal pounds so that it can be open and acknowledged and the public can be told honestly that the killing is caused by overbreeding, desocializing by isolation (yard/guard dogs), and abandonment, and that these causes need to be legislated. Only if the public knows the truth will the shame of all the killing be addressed.

But what is happening is that some municipal pounds have got on the "no-kill" bandwagon so that in some municipalities both the pound and the SPCA are trying to find ways to justify the dog-killing that uncontrolled breeding, desocializing, and abandonment makes inevitable.

We know that some SPCA branches are doing a much better job of disposing of dogs than others, but those branches are not legally obligated by a pound contract to become crowded with unsellable dogs. Crowded SPCAs must kill, or sell to anyone with the money, regardless of how unsuitable the purchaser is, with no regard to the animal's future.

The important point is this... that only municipal pounds have a legal obligation to dispose of dogs - the SPCA has no obligation to do it.

But in the 1950's the SPCA chose to get into the dog-disposal business. The SPCA claims to have done this because it would treat dogs better than municipal pounds did, but AAS showed conclusively that the SPCA's treatment of dogs, and its methods to kill them, was cruel and inhumane too, for the same reason that municipal pounds were cruel - money... the bottom line. It is cheap to kill dogs and expensive to save them.

Again - the question that needs to be answered first is not how and for what reason we should kill unwanted dogs, but who should kill them.

AAS believes that it should not be the BC SPCA that kills society's unwanted dogs. Rather we believe the SPCA should be three things: the enforcer of humane standards of dog-disposal by municipal pounds; the crusaders for laws to prevent the causes of so many dogs having to be disposed of; and the indefatigable educator of our society's expectations of animal welfare. But perhaps there just isn't enough money in that.