Animal welfare and animal rights are not separate terms. If the law takes away the right of a person to harm animals, it logically follows that a right not to be harmed has been conferred on animals. The BC SPCA advocates for animal rights when it urges changes to the federal Criminal Code that would take away from people some long-held rights to harm animals.

Yet one of the BC SPCA's directors - the men and women who form BC SPCA policies and beliefs - wrote in a Prince George newspaper, "Whenever someone calls me an animals rights advocate I take it as an insult." For years, many other SPCA Directors and Head Office staff have said that the BC SPCA is an animal welfare organization - not an animal rights or animal activist organization. This has protected the SPCA from being labelled extremist (which could cause it to lose donations from conservative donors and businesses), while discrediting competing animal activist organizations. But for about a decade it has advocated to government for laws that confer on animals the right not to be harmed.

So there appears to be a basic contradiction right at the very top, in what the BC SPCA is and isn't. This contradiction surely must cause a lot of confusion in the SPCA's ranks and certainly accounts for the myriad and almost daily contradictions that AAS is told of at the branch level, where some staff and almost all the volunteers hold one idea of animal welfare that includes animal rights and advocacy, but where other staff, usually the manager, hold a contrary view and impose policies that result in dissatisfaction and friction, sometimes spilling out into the media, as happened last week in Sechelt. (See: Coast Reporter: Wilson Creek shelter in crises, say former SPCA staff http://animaladvocates.com/cgi-bin/newsroom.pl/read/13934 )

Head Office staff are also frequently self-contradictory and this also spills out into the media sometimes. Then the contradictions come thick and fast.

It must have been almost ten years ago now that I began saying to the SPCA, just be honest and real animal welfare will follow. It really is that simple.