Someone from Petcetera's management, interviewed on CBC radio's news this morning about Petcetera's decision to stop selling rabbits, said that Petcetera quickly agreed when the SPCA raised the issue with the company.

Does that mean that in spite of years of the SPCA killing many of the soon-unwanted rabbits that Petcetera sold, the SPCA only just asked Petcetera to stop selling them?

Our list of documents for discovery in the lawsuit for defamation brought against AAS in 2004 ( http://www.animaladvocates.com/lawsuit/ ), contains 50 mentions of Petcetera (so far). Nicholas Read of the Sun, in a series of articles (“SPCA wrong to associate with new store”: Petcetera/SPCA million dollar deal; “Pet store breaks its humane-sale promise”; and others) shows the SPCA/Petcetera business relationship goes back ten years.

For rabbit rescuers, the process was anything but quick. Olga Betts, quoted in Anderson's article, worked very hard for several years, doing what is called "pulling" rabbits out of Lower Mainland SPCAs that were scheduled to be killed.

Carmina Gooch did the same, but she did more than help lower the SPCA's expenses and destruction figures; she wrote letter after letter for years - to the SPCA, to Petcetera, and to the newspapers, pointing out the ethical conflict of the SPCA's business partnership with a store that sold rabbits some of which the SPCA later killed. Carmina also took photos of rabbits at various SPCAs and Petcetera. And she openly posted all her information on the only forum that provided a voice for the "other side of the story" -- the AAS website.

Carmina also kept a file of all the information that the rabbit rescuers emailed to her about the difficulty of rescuing rabbits from the SPCA.

For decades people quietly saved rabbits from the SPCA, yet nothing changed. The conclusion we draw is that it is Carmina's letters and documentation, combined with access to a public forum, that was effective in making Petcetera stop selling rabbits.

Further proof? Petcetera is not going to stop selling rabbits in its stores in other provinces. SPCAs in all the other provinces kill rabbits too, so it follows that SPCAs killing cast-off rabbits can't be the reason Petcetera will stop selling rabbits in BC. Something in BC must be different. We suspect it is the extremely vocal and active combination of people like Carmina Gooch and the freedom of speech that the internet provides.

The SPCA's press release says, "The BC SPCA rescues more than 1,700 rabbits every year in its 36 branches across BC." ( http://animaladvocates.com/cgi-bin/newsroom.pl/read/15809 )

Because the SPCA does not say it has killed any of the 1700 "rescued" rabbits, readers might think that not one rabbit has been killed by the SPCA because, afterall, you can't use the word "rescue" to mean "kill" -- can you?

It seems you can if you are the SPCA. Not one word in that press release even hints about the rabbits it has killed or about all the rabbit groups that "rescued" some of those 1700 rabbits from the SPCA!

Of course this announcement is good news. But what is less than comforting is the years of struggle it took. Why wasn't the plain immorality of this partnership corrected by the SPCA long ago? An SPCA employee said recently that it is a shame that the SPCA only reacts to bad publicity. We don't often find ourselves in agreement with SPCA employees, but we have a long list of humane policy changes made only after bad publicity reached a tipping point which prove that statement.