February 22, 2007

http://www.cbc.ca/earlyedition/rickCluff.html

CBC radio's Early Edition (AM 690) has a regular Thursday spot hosted by Shiral Tobin about dogs, called "Unleashed".

Shiral was complained to about a dog kept in a chainlink pen with a plastic igloo doghouse on Broadway in full view of the public.

She interviewed the dog's owner who said that the SPCA had been complained to many times but told him that the pen and igloo were a "Shangri-La" for dogs.

If that is what the SPCA told the dog's owner it would not surprise us in the least as the SPCA has described to us, several times, a garage as being just as good as a home for a dog to live in 24/7.

The SPCA inspector who is quoted saying a pen and a doghouse is a "Shangri-La" is a uniformed and trained representative of the BC SPCA. We hope the standard of animal welfare his comments represent are not the BC SPCA's official standard of animal welfare, though since many of the BC SPCA's uniformed and trained representatives say more or less the same thing to people complaining to them about suffering dogs on chains and in pens and garages, we fear it must be.

We know that the SPCA's animal welfare standard as represented to so many people almost daily and by the "Shangri-La" comment, is the standard of people who keep animals in pens and on chains. But is the SPCA's standard the norm among people who love animals and who are concerned with animal welfare? Is, "the dog has food, water, and shelter" still an acceptable answer to animal lovers and animal welfarists? Many of these decent people donate to the SPCA perhaps not knowing that the SPCA thinks pens, tethers, and garages are acceptable ways to keep any animals, much less dogs, which are highly social animals, craving human contact even more than contact with their own species.

When the SPCA was phoned about this dog that had been on this heavy chain for more than five years in full view of a busy road, they told the complainant that they had had 400 complaints....