Many animal lovers in BC are under the misaprehension that the SPCA had or has a no-kill policy. And some critics of CAMP believe that CAMP has replaced this policy and that a better CAMP will mean that the SPCA will not kill so many dogs.

There seems to be little comprehension that it is the two intake policies, open surrender and pound contracting, that mean that the SPCA must have an outtake policy that permits it kill a lot of animals. CAMP only does what the SPCA has always done - kill the unsellable - only now, to prevent itself from being savaged in the media again as it was after it lied by saying that the six nice dogs that were killed for space at the Vancouver SPCA in January 2002 were killed for aggression, now it must have "scientific proof" that dogs are aggressive before it kills them. Unless the SPCA discontinues those two intake policies (especially open surrender), and because of the internet watching and reporting (instead of as formerly with only the gullible media parroting the SPCA's own words), it must have a water-tight justification for every death (of dogs at any rate; cats are not as easy to watch and track).

Unless the SPCA can explain where CAMP is going (and it is stubbornly uncommunicative as it always has been, further proof that the SPCA is not reformed in any profound way), then it is open to the charge that the SPCA's animal welfare policy is in a state of chaos, and bringing in big guns with strings of degrees and published research instead of divesting itself of the intake policies that require so much killing, has only made the chaos worse.

UK animal behaviourist Dr Mugford said privately to an attendee at the recent Vancouver SPCA seminar where he was a speaker, that CAMP seemed to be all theory without one action item in it (no remedial programs) and is an academic exercise that has shown no benefit.

Perhaps the SPCA intends CAMP to be a benefit to animals and it needs to be given more time for the benefits to be apparent. Perhaps it needs more time to put its promised life-saving remedial programs in place along with its death-dealing tests. But as far as can be seen, CAMP appears to be what AAS has been warning it may be from the day it was hurriedly cobbled together using the unscientific online Hetts test with the promise that it would be replaced by the scientifically validated RSPCA test - that it matters not what test "tool" the SPCA uses if it is the SPCA's intention is to use it to justify killing because of its intake policies.

What a black, dirty hole the SPCA climbed into with its decades-long intake policies, but it is not ever going to climb out using enabling policies like CAMP.

Only if the SPCA internalises that honesty really is the best policy; that only good can flow from honesty; that honesty opens wide the door to limitless possibilities; that honesty is the only way to disarm its critics; that honesty will remove the allure of the income from intake/outtake policies, leaving only solutions that are animal-serving, not SPCA serving, will the SPCA be able to climb out if its animal-killing hole.