Reports reach us of improvements in the attitudes of SPCA employees in the Lower Mainland where the SPCA still holds several dogcatching contracts. We have reports that there are some employees at the SPCA in Maple Ridge, Port Coquitlam, and Vancouver who are making a greater effort to find a solution other than offing the animals, but the reports are very mixed. We will be told a "good" story about an employee and then a "bad" story about the same employee. But what we can say is that "bad" is not nearly as bad as it used to be. So progress is being made.

The little progress toward humane treatment of animals by the SPCA that has been made, was only made because of the external pressure of the truth getting out. We have not one example of self-improvement by the SPCA - only of improvement that has been forced on it, that it has resisted against with all its might, that it has used animals' money to beat off in law suits, that it has lied through its teeth about, has resulted in change, and that of course can't be trusted by a reasonable person.

Some of the P.R. nightmares that have driven the SPCA to make improvements are the Sun's Barbara Yaffe who wrote a huge article with ghastly photos about the atrocities at the Burnaby SPCA (which were so representative of most SPCAs), CTV's Renu Bakshi who told the Cheech story, the six Vancouver SPCA volunteers who took the story of the mass killing of nice dogs to the media, ARC's Donna Liberson who has gone public with all the killing many times, Rick and Millie Sargent who withstood the SPCA's lawyers and continued to tell the truth about the Victoria SPCA, the Sun's Nicholas Read who broke the stories about the Vancouver SPCA CEO's $204,000 salary, AAS's web site, and hundreds of other brave people who chose to get the truth out instead of carefully covering their butts. In every case the SPCA has first tried to bury the story under lies, but slowly, because none of us have given up or been frightened off, the SPCA is improving.