The SPCA argues that it is animal welfare and it is humane to take all animals and kill the unrehomable (unsellable) ones, on the grounds that people will otherwise kill their pets in less humane ways or abandon their pets. (Aside: it can be argued that abandoned animals have a better chance at a happy outcome than animals taken to an SPCA because of the wide-spread animal rescue network that rushes in to assist all abandoned animals now, doing it to higher standards of animal welfare than the SPCA does.) Now that the SPCA no longer kills dogs with decrepit electrothanators and cats in gas boxes, it can say that its methods of killing are no longer actionably cruel.

Yet it admits that it takes in animals and then kills them for space, as it just did on page six of a City of Vancouver report:

"The BC SPCA also takes in unwanted exotic/wild animals. From July 2005 to July 2006, the BC SPCA received 27 abandoned exotic pets from Vancouver alone; mostly reptiles, birds and insects where nearly half of these animals had to be euthanized due to lack of space."

What happened to the SPCA's grand announcement that it was going to stop killing for space? "SPCA Moratorium on Killing for Space" read the headlines, which the public to this day still mistakenly believes means that the SPCA is no kill.

How can killing for space be the same thing as killing to be kind? It's not logical. Real animal welfarists use their money and energy finding alternatives to killing. In the last few years the SPCA has lowered the numbers of animals it kills (the numbers are still not public) by transferring dogs from Interior and Northern branches to Lower Mainland SPCAs, and by giving cats and kittens to little animal welfare groups. But when some transferred dogs are killed by the Lower Mainland branches instead of the Interior and Northern branches, it leaves this transfer program open to the interpretation that it is more a way to sell more "product" (the SPCA's own word for its animals) than it is true animal welfare. And when many of the cats and kittens given to the little groups are the sick ones, that can be interpreted as a bottom-line practice, not an animal welfare practice.