The SPCA has done worse than just enable pet abandonment by irresponsible owners, it has profited from it. Full shelters attract donations from animal-lovers. And lots of new "marketable product" (the SPCA's own term) means lots of choice for pet shoppers to choose from. And since the product is supplied free, and disposal is cheap, there is no gain by spending money to make it more marketable (vets, grooming, training, etc, the "remediation" component of CAMP that looks so good on paper).

AAS comment on Nicholas Read's article:

"Is the SPCA unwittingly contributing to the region's huge numbers of irresponsible pet owners by never saying "No" to their castoffs?"

AAS would not have included the word "unwittingly" as it implies that the SPCA was unaware of the effect its unlimited surrender policy had in enabling and encouraging irresponsibility by providing a free disposal service for irresponsible owners, a highly unlikely possibility. It implies that the SPCA never made the connection between unlimited surrender and the all the killing it did for so long and in fact continues to do to this day. It implies that everyone at the SPCA just wasn't smart enough to figure this out or to make the connection between the high profile, donation attracting, full to bursting shelters, and the suppliers of all the animals that filled the "shelters".

"This is not a new idea, but one that merits more debate".

Read wrote this five years ago, and the concept must have been understood fifty years ago when the SPCA chose to get into the pound contracting business, adding stray dog disposal to unlimited surrender disposal it was already doing. And yet the SPCA has not, at least publicly or in answer to AAS's years of questioning, debated the morality of policies that require it to kill animals - unlimited surrender and pound disposal but which attract almost all its income.

"Most animals "euthanized" in shelters are killed because there is no room for them"

Or in SPCA parlance, no "resources", which stands for money, but as the SPCA has historically not provided the audited financial statements that it is required by law to provide, there is no way to know if the money meant by donators to be used to save animals from "euthanasia" is being spent instead on management salaries, retreats to pricey resorts, and other perks.

"By accepting a dog or cat from someone who can't be bothered to look after it anymore, the shelter is, in effect, telling that someone not to worry about it because the problem will be solved neatly behind closed doors in the injection room."

Not so neatly. Until recently the SPCA still used gas boxes to kill cats and until some volunteers and ex-directors went to the media, it used a machine called an electrothanator that "fried" dogs. (see http://www.animaladvocates.com/spca-electrothanators.htm. The SPCA has only been humane under extreme pressure of scrutiny, otherwise it has been in the animal selling/disposal business. It avoided enforcement of cruelty laws and sold intact breeding animals, even permitting its staff to be part of the breeding/selling business. It claimed to prefer education to enforcement, but did little. It said that pet overpopulation was a serious problem, but did nothing to control it. Its own Act, the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, could have been used to prosecute it for keeping animals in its "shelters" in distress, even critical distress. These are just a few of the things that prove that the SPCA historically was not in animal welfare but in animal disposal.