When I first started animal rescue, it was, as it is with so many others, by feral cat and stray cat rescue. Who has ever done cat trapping who can forget the nights spent in a car with a cold cup of coffee, waiting for the clank of the humane trap closing behind a terrified little abandoned creature, often with her kittens stashed nearby? Olive Sellens was one of my mentors.

One of the very first things I was warned about by Olive and everyone in animal rescue was to never take any cat to an SPCA. If it even acted the least bit feral it would be killed as the earliest opportunity. I confirmed that for myself by talking to employees at the North Vancouver and the Vancouver SPCA. They made no bones about it, and there was no hint of regret.

I also found out that the SPCA would make its cheap method of killing - the gas box - even cheaper by jamming many cats and kittens into the box together. And I found out that even if the cat had a rescuer's tattoo in its ear, it would be killed too.

Until very recently, the SPCA's official printed policy was to kill all feral cats. Unofficially it killed staggering numbers of friendly stray cats too; it won't admit to how many.

The SPCA still has no feral cat assistance program. It claims not to have the money. But it has the money to harass the women who dedicate themselves to doing what the donating public assumes the SPCA is doing. Those are the BC SPCA's priorities - made abundantly clear by the SPCA's spokesperson, Lorie Chortyk when she dismissed the dying Bev Parent as a "hoarder", a term of opprobrium that is used to describe a person (usually a woman) who is deranged and dirty, with a house full of sick cats and newspapers stacked to the ceiling. All the spinning in the media the SPCA is forced to do to try to counteract Ms Chortyk's mean-spirited insults of a woman who makes the SPCA look bad by the mere fact of her goodness and her hard work, will only partly work, and spinning is working less and less well. With Ms Chortyk speaking for the SPCA, soon, none of the media will trust the SPCA anymore.