My mentors in feral cat rescue and animal welfare were women who had been doing this work for years, some of them for thirty years and that was twenty years ago. So for fifty years, these women had been saving cats from the SPCA. These women raised thousands of dollars a year and impoverished themselves, doing the work that the SPCA got millions of dollars by either claiming or implying it did. These women worked unceasingly to keep cats away from the SPCA's killers. And the SPCA got the money.
These women were afraid of the SPCA and for the most part, kept silent about what they knew. But a new generation of women refuse to be silent, and so, after years of insulting, harassing and dismissing rescuers and critics, the SPCA is reacting.
Unfortunately, the reaction has been to ramp up the P.R., not to improve animal welfare practices or policies in any meaningful way. 90 cats killed this year by the Kamloops SPCA is just one of many proofs of that. Aggressively pursuing dog-catcher contracts is another, as long as the SPCA kills a single dog because of a contract. There's the SPCA's "scientific" dog assessment tests that are designed to excuse the killing of dogs that need rehabilitation and the new claim that the SPCA has rehabilitation programs. The fraudulent article in Senior's Living is fact, not opinion. Promoting pets at Christmas is just today's example.