This and other message boards have many accounts of hard-nosed employees hired to carry out SPCA pound contracts which absolutely require them to kill excess animals. For ten years AAS has been told stories just like these two, about every branch in BC except two, Nanaimo and Powell River, neither of which have pound contracts. There may be other SPCA's that do not do bylaw enforcement or impound/disposal (some municipalities use their own bylaw employees to do the enforcement and contract with the SPCA to do impound/disposal), and that are trying as hard as Nanaimo and Powell River to be unlike most other SPCAs. If you know of an SPCA that has no contract with its municipality to do either, let us know. Asking the SPCA for answers is like talking into a black hole.

The SPCA will not shake its reputation for being for being ruthless to animals until it gets out of pound/disposal contracting and deals with the employees who it hired to carry out the pragmatic business of killing society's excess animals (instead of working to prevent their proliferation). Any employees who really hates killing animals - as they all claim - will be happy to be able to stop.

As long as there are more animals than homes (5 dogs, 45 cats for every home) then millions have to be killed, but it should be paid for by the taxpayer, not SPCA donators. Municipalities should have to kill their own excess animals and the taxpayers need to know what the true cost of uncontrolled breeding is, and get mad enough to demand controls. The SPCA has quietly taken money in the form of contracts to get rid of society's excess dogs and uses donators' money to get rid of excess cats. The SPCA must learn to "JUST SAY NO! Kill your own animals - we're out of the animal-killing business".

The SPCA employees who are using other messageboards to anonymously attack the new SPCA board of directors and CEO, (who may be trying to take the BC SPCA in a new direction away from wholesale slaughter, we will find out in October), are protecting the status quo - the SPCA's pound contracting empire that provides their jobs for life.

They seem to be trying to prevent the BC SPCA from getting out of pound contracting . These people have been trained to dispose of excess and unwanted animals, that is what they know how to do. That is what accounts for the hundreds of stories like Michele's and the letter to the Maple Ridge Times, and Brigitta MacMillan's story ( http://www.animaladvocates.com/spca-mr-cat-cages.htm ) and dozens more on our web site and hundreds that we have been told of employees who didn't seem to give a damn about animal suffering or needs.

The SPCA's hands will be bloody until it gets out of animal disposal. The San Francisco SPCA was reformed by first stopping pound contracting with the City of San Francisco and now it is the world leader in animal welfare. We think the BC SPCA understands this, but it may have as many as 100 of these contracts, not just one as did the San Francisco SPCA, and there may be as many as 200 employees that were hired to do this bloody work.

It is missing the point to say all the blame for the sorry state of the BC SPCA is due to management only, although it must take the majority of the blame for building a pound contracting empire in the first place. But the staus quo must change if the SPCA is really to move in a New Direction, and that means some employees must either change or go. We hope they decide to change.

Read the account of surly SPCA/pound employees here http://www.mapleridgenews.com/ , go to letters tab (right under header) and read the letter from Laura Edwardson about the "bureaucratic meanie".