I got started in animal advocacy the way so many women do - by feral cat trap/neuter/release. The profound trust that I had undertaken forced me to learn so much about cat behaviour, cat disease, cat psychology, cat husbandry and the ethics of the work I was doing. Like all the real animal welfarists who were doing this, there was never a question that killing the cats I was "saving" was an ethical option. As the need grew, more money had to be raised, more solutions had to be found.

When I was told by the elderly women who had been rescuing cats for decades that the SPCA killed cats by the thousands and then claimed that killing was animal welfare, I never doubted for a moment that the SPCA was ethically corrupted. Even if I hadn't been told by a long-time manager of an SPCA that the solution to the cat over-population problem was a mass round-up-and-kill program (which the SPCA would be paid to do); even if I didn't know that the Victoria SPCA was killing dogs that barked to stop residents from making noise complaints that would have required it to spend some of its banked millions on noise-baffling, it was as plain as 1+1=2.

Many other facts about the SPCA emerged that confirmed this: that it let its own employees, the ones that were doing the killing of unsellable pets, to breed and sell marketable pets; that the SPCA sold intact animals by the thousands every year and then had the gall to repeatedly tell the media that the problem was irresponsible people who didn't sterilize their pets; that the SPCA "low cost" clinic was more expensive than some vets and was killing the pets of poor people who could not afford to pay the fees, and was making it nearly impossible for cat rescuers to use the clinic; that the SPCA killed animals that were sick, old, ugly, nervous, depressed, too common, not "liked" by any member of the staff, barked, pooped, or had just not sold soon enough; that the SPCA "shelters" were grim, diseased prisons with trained executioners - no one trained in animal welfare, animal behaviour, or animal ethics, just in warehousing and killing. And possibly the most blatantly unethical of all, the multi-million dollars worth of pound dog-catcher contracts all over BC to dispose of dogs. There were too many instances of ethical corruption to list here, but my investigations of the SPCA could find no action or policy of the BC SPCA that wasn't corrupted in some way.