Lorraine Chiorando, the Nanaimo SPCA manager, assured AAS that the Nanaimo SPCA does not have any contracts with any municipality to enforce bylaws or impound/dispose of dogs. We think that only where there is not the legal obligation to be the dog-police or to dispose of dogs is it possible to be open, above board, and welcoming of volunteers. At no time in the history of AAS's investigation into the SPCA and what is wrong with it, have we been told of any of the anti-animal behaviour at the Nanaimo SPCA that is the given in "contracting" SPCAs . Behaviours such as surly employees who don't know what animals are in their cells, whether they are sick or not, fed or not, watered or not (and don't seem to give a damn); secrecy; treating volunteers like pain-in-the-neck job-snatchers; indifference to the suffering of all animals, including the ones in their "care", to name a few.

The City of Nanaimo does its own enforcement and has its own pound. The taxpayers pay to control/collect/impound/dispose of dogs in Nanaimo, not SPCA donators. The Nanaimo SPCA does not have to hide what it does and does not have to hire dog-disposers. The Nanaimo pound does not pretend it is no-kill (a logical impossibility) and so if a person takes a dog there, there is no pretence that it is in safe hands, as the SPCA has pretended for fifty years. That is how it should be and animal lovers could then concentrate on reforming the pounds and animal control bylaws in their municipalities because that is where, as voters and taxpayers, they have the most power to effect change.

The SPCA's entrenched and current problems are rooted in it's fifty-year old decision to get into pound contracting. It's motives may have been noble but the end was inevitable - secrecy, deceit, and a culture of killing. (See the link below.) The SPCA's attempts to reform itself cannot work as long as it carries the bad seed of dog-disposal.

The SPCA's hands are not going to be clean until it stops pound-contracting. The first thing that Richard Avanzino, the reformer of the San Francisco SPCA did, was to get out of pound contracting with the City of San Francisco. He understood that animal welfare and pound contracting could only be combined at the eventual cost of moral and financial bankruptcy. Then Avanzino went on to create the world-leader in real animal welfare. And he changed it from being impoverished to incredibly wealthy. Avanzino made sure that the money was used to implement the kind of animal welfare programs that we hope the SPCA will emulate if it also makes the right decisions about pound-contracting and open admissions.

The employees who are anonymously fighting tooth and nail to derail any SPCA intention to stop pound contracting, may find themselves very happy to be working in a true shelter where volunteers are welcomed (if their union will allow), and where they do not have to kill animals to make room for more (this will require the SPCA to make reforms to its unlimited admissions surrender policy too). Or if these objecting employees are not comfortable relearning their jobs, they can work for a municipal pound where dogs still have to killed (until laws are passed controlling the backyard breeding of big cross breeds which are almost 100% of the dogs in pounds being killed), and laws are passed banning the ruining of dogs by isolation and chaining.