I'm surprised this subject is coming up after all this time. I honestly don't remember now who said what. Perhaps I forgot to pass on Mr Flavelle's "explanation" or perhaps I did pass it on and it got lost in cyberspace. More likely I gave up because I didn't understand his "explanation".

My faith in the SPCA and their "explanations" was completely undermined during Mr. Favelle's tenure as shelter manager. So much seemed inconsistent and illogical. In the area of infection control, their requirements of the volunteers were stringent in the extreme, yet their requirements of themselves seemed to be lax. While I was Pet Squad Coordinator, he banned me from entering the small animal room for a month because I had fostered a cat with URI. He claimed I would bring the URI into the room on my clothes for a month after my sick foster cat had recovered. I appealed to the SPCA's own head vet, Dr. Lawson, and he said it should be safe for me to enter the cat room. But Mr. Favelle did not agree. He set up obstacles that suggested to me there was a lack of support for the volunteers' efforts. Another example: he phoned me one Sunday morning at about 8:00 a.m. insisting that I had to deliver the adoption money from the previous day's Pet Squad IMMEDIATELY since it was month-end cut off and HE NEEDED IT RIGHT NOW. The volunteers jumped through hoops for the animals' sakes, so I threw a coat over my nightclothes and drove the money up to the shelter as soon as I hung up the phone.

Showing me euthanasia logs kept by himself and his staff did not help me to understand the statistics. Originally I assumed they just hadn't kept count of animals euthanized for other reasons and that the "euthanized space" numbers were accurate. Why they lumped them all under "no space" is still beyond me. He didn't explain why the record keeping was so poor that the stats needed a convoluted explanation.

After a while I stopped trying to sort out problems with him. And the problems kept occurring. So I would just nod and then appeal to Brian Houlihan, SPCA Volunteer Coordinator. If not for Brian Houlihan, Pet Squad would never have survived; nor would the hundreds of small animals saved by Pet Squad.