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In February 2002, the
Vancouver SPCA killed six dogs. It was the final straw
for some volunteers and they went on television to tell
the public what really goes on at so many SPCAs.
The man who has been running
the BC SPCA's pound contracting/shelter (the dog-catcher)
business empire for twenty years, John van der Hoeven, was
questioned on TV and said the dogs were killed because they
were dangerous. This is the same man who said on CBC radio
that the North Vancouver SPCA (pound contractor) hadn't
killed a dog since 1993 when the North Vancouver SPCA's own
municipal stats showed otherwise.
The volunteers were
outraged. They pointed out that they had been walking and
handling these dogs, some for many months, and they were
not dangerous. (And if they had been dangerous, why did
the SPCA allow the dogs to be handled by volunteers?).
One volunteer said that the
person who said the dogs were killed for being "dangerous"
should be fired.
This brutal P.R. blow caused
the BC SPCA to announce a "moratorium on killing for space",
but since no intake policies changed, the SPCA had to devise
other justifications for the same amount of killing. It drew
up a list of reasons an animal was "unadoptable" and then it
changed its P.R. to, "We don't kill any adoptable animal".
Three guesses what the "new" reasons were? Yes, the same
old reasons: age, illness or injury (even easily treated
ones) and now including animals whose "mental health had
degraded because of too-long confinement" (in tiny SPCA
cages and concrete cells); in other words, animals that had
not sold; in other words, to make room for more sellable
animals, in other words, for space. In order to justify the
killing of so many dogs, a "scientific test" was devised
that bamboozled the media and public and permitted the SPCA
to go on killing dogs that would take time and money to
rehabilitate, that might be legal liabilities, and so that
the SPCA could go on contracting to be the dog-catcher with
municipalities all over BC, to kill any possibly dangerous
dogs for municipalities concerned with public safety and
liability, as it had for decades.
(No one knows
how many contracts there were all over BC for decades and
how much money the BC SPCA made for disposing of unwanted
or dangerous animals (we estimate about $7-$10 million a
year). |
