After decades of getting rid of hundreds employees for "caring too much about the animals"; employees who needed no training in compassion and the causes of emotional suffering in dogs (or cats or rabbits and rodents and birds), who needed no training to recognize that an animal was dying of gangrene or oozing, infected wounds, or punctured bladders, or smashed bones, and of protecting the jobs of brutal, indifferent, uneducated bullies who harassed the kind employees for cleaning cages and cells of feces on their own time until those kind employees had to quit, and of promoting the human/animal bullies, the SPCA is teaching something other than cheap, in-house killing of the helpless, speechless beings that were so horribly unlucky as to end up at the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Amanda Muir is only the public face of the way the SPCA treats anyone who presumes to care too much about animals.

The SPCA has had over one hundred years to observe the untutored compassion and ethics of all the people who really have been doing true animal welfare, instinctively and honestly, and on very little money, so it ought to get it right. These thousands of true animal-welfarists become impoverished by using their own assets to do the work the SPCA collected many millions of dollars a year from gullible and deceived animal-lovers in BC.

SPCA Welcomes Dr. Rebecca Ledger
Dr. Rebecca Ledger, an expert on the behavioural and physiological well-being of dogs, will be assisting the BC SPCA in the creation of a training video and workbook. The video will explain the causes of emotional suffering in dogs, how to recognize when their welfare is poor, and practical ways to prevent and treat these signs of suffering. The aim of this video is to provide kennel workers with information that they need to improve the welfare of dogs in their care, and will complement the Society's Emotional Life of Cats video.

But will the SPCA get it right for dogs? It produced (attended by the masses of P.R. that attend everything the SPCA does), the cat video it refers to. Since then it has kept killing cats by the thousands. But some of them had hide-and-perch boxes in their tiny cages for awhile before they were killed - if the staff could be bothered with them. But most didn't even have that.

And what purpose does a training video serve if the SPCA keeps taking in more "product" than there is a market for and it has to kill the unsold?

One purpose is P.R., something the SPCA does very well, having honed that skill over its one hundred-plus history.

As usual, we hope this is an honest attempt at animal welfare, but too many past disappointments do not make us sanguine. How can the SPCA really think it can reinform the minds and souls of long-time employees who were hired for its multi-million dollar pet disposal business and who are shudderingly adept at that and little else?