The Langley pound's manager is right - they are a pound and a pound's reason for existence is public safety, just like the police except that the police must protect humans from humans and pounds must protect humans from dogs. If a pound also tries to practice animal welfare, good for it, but it can't be practiced in preference to public safety.

Taxpayers are only required to pay to keep the public safe from stray dogs, not to take owner-surrendered dogs from people. No pound should expect its taxpayers to finance the disposal of owned dogs, like the Marston's. It only encourages and enables people to get rid of pets - for free! Why would free pet disposal be anything that a municipality should enable and encourage and pay for?

The article says that the Marstons "adopted" their dog from a breeder at thirteen weeks. Unless no money changed hands this was no adoption - it was a straight out purchase.

The use of false terminology like "adoption" for a sale, and "euthanasia" for the killing of healthy or treatable animals, and "shelter" for cells where the "sheltered" may be killed, is one of the basic marketing tools of the pet disposal industry so that their pet disposal is obscured as animal welfare.

Free disposal (rehoming) of people's unwanted pets on a large scale is not necessarily noble -- first, it is always enabling, and second, there is sometimes a profit motive behind doing it.

The majority of the public is easily fooled, but it is irresponsible for the press to call buying a pup an adoption.

If the Langley pound is going to continue to present itself as an animal protection society, its employees need to be told to stop advising people to kill their healthy animal.