Comox SPCA Manager, Marianne Mitton is quoted saying, “We’ve reached our capacity and have had to turn away cats from people trying to bring them in because we have no place to put them,”

Good for Mitton for stating the obvious truth. AAS has been pointing for about ten years out how unethical it is to kill unsold animals -- even if they are now sick -- to make room for more animals that aren't sick and might sell.

It's not only AAS saying that the choice of quantity over quality is immoral -- in fact is not animal welfare but is animal disposal (a business). Countless others, with years more experience and with far more impressive credentials and education that ours, have been saying this for decades. We just don't believe that no one at the SPCA ever figured out that unlimited surrender not only encourages pet-dumping (in fact, the SPCA itself has begun to say so), but requires large numbers of unsellable or unsold animals to be killed.

Here is just one admission by the SPCA: " We have a pet overpopulation problem in British Columbia. While the BC SPCA finds homes for most of the animals in its care, in many parts of the province the sheer numbers - of cats especially - mean that tens of thousands of healthy animals are being euthanized every year."

Killing healthy animals is not animal welfare. That is not rocket-science and we don't believe that the SPCA didn't understand this for the decades it has killed ten of thousands of animals.

Killing healthy animals is a form of pest control: the control of "pet pests". The SPCA is still actively pursuing pest-pet control contracts in BC. What kind of an organization is needed for this business?

The business of pest-pet disposal needs employees who are willing to kill animals, even those that are healthy, or those that could be made healthy.
The business of pest-pet disposal trains the employees in cheap in-house killing.

That (and much more) describes the BC SPCA. The public has always bought the SPCA's line that it doesn't like to have to kill all these animals, but we think that if the public found out that one of the little animal welfare societies was killing healthy animals to make room, that they would not buy that. So -- why the latitude given to the SPCA? We can only think that the public simply got used long ago to the SPCA killing so many animals; that the public didn't understand that the SPCA had a choice, the same choice that the many alternative societies have made ethically.