----- Original Message -----
From: Robin Schiele
To: Capital News
Cc: ross freake
Sent: Monday, February 03, 2003 9:06 PM
Subject: Kelowna SPCA

Letter to the Editor

I can’t believe that the Kelowna SPCA – of all groups – has forgotten its own principles. Does the group not remember what the P stands for in its name? Instead of "preventing" cruelty, it perpetrates it. Its treatment of the Beaverdell dogs over the past few months has been nothing short of scandalous. Of the 50-odd dogs (the number used by the media seems to vary with each story) 38 (not 28 as reported on Feb. 2) have so far been euthanized.

Two of those dogs my wife and a friend took for a walk only the day before they met their death. Indeed, we discussed whether we should adopt them. An SPCA official in Vancouver claims the animals were "vicious." Does that mean the Kelowna officials willingly and knowingly allowed unsuspecting volunteers like her to take these ‘vicious’ dogs for a social walk? If they were so vicious, how come they met another dog on the walk, sniffing each other nose to nose and wagging their tails quite happily?

Sad to say, the slaughter was done, as I understand it, at the hands of a senior SPCA employee, not a vet as one would expect. Some of the dogs remaining at the Casorso Road site are now terrified of the green bags which were used as body bags and the freezer where the corpses were kept at what has become a slaughterhouse for those poor animals.

Robin Schiele,