We know that the SPCA has taken money for special purposes and put it into general revenues for a long time, probably always. Cases at the Delta SPCA are fully documented.

As everyone who does real animal welfare knows, the Delta SPCA was special because Amanda Muir worked so hard to stop it from killing callously and needlessly by networking with alternative rescue groups - the ones who rescue out of love, who impoverish themselves, and work tirelessly to rescue dogs and cats from the $20 million a year SPCA, the groups that do real animal welfare and rescue, and get few donations - because the SPCA gets almost every penny, as much as $17 million a year with its P.R. machine, and does not do real animal welfare. [Read: What is real/not real animal welfare: http://www.animaladvocates.com/cgi-bin/newsroom.pl/read/6644]

These are the groups that the SPCA claims in the media to "work with" but whose offers to take animals in need at an SPCA are met with stony silence or a flat No, and the animal is killed instead. Amanda showed the Delta SPCA staff how it could be done and they joined with her in doing real animal welfare and Delta SPCA became the only SPCA in the Lower Mainland that many rescuers worked with and completely trusted. (We only know of two other SPCA's of over 30, Duncan and Powell River, that real animal welfarists trust.)

But things changed when Craig Daniell, who had been hired away from the Ontario SPCA to be the BC SPCA's Manager of Cruelty Investigations in November 2002, became CEO of the BC SPCA on the firing of Douglas Brimacombe in May 2003. Daniell began hiring some of his OSPCA colleagues and placing them in positions of power. He made Michelle Rodgers the manager of the Delta SPCA.

The rumours that it was not as easy for Delta SPCA staff to get dogs into the safety of a rescue group received confirmation on June 16th this year, when Cheech was stolen from the Delta SPCA by a volunteer, with the knowledge of Amanda and other staff. Staff had offered, in writing, to foster Cheech and pay for training, and had been turned down. AAS offered to foster Cheech and do whatever rehabilitation was required, at our expense, on the phone and in writing to both Rodgers and Daniell, on June 16th, the day Cheech was to be killed. Immediately after our conversation with Daniell, he sent "enforcers" from the Vancouver SPCA to make sure the kill order was carried out. Staff and volunteers still defied the bosses, called the media, removed Cheech from the SPCA, and the rest is history...ignoble and highly self-damaging history, made even more damaging by the SPCA's repeated insistence in the media that it had the "scientific proof" that Cheech was unrehabilitatable and highly dangerous, even in the face of its own test which Cheech passed, and in staff and volunteer's knowledge that Cheech was just fearful of some men, but only at first (extremely common behaviour in dogs), and was a cheerful, affectionate puppy.

The damage from the SPCA's mismanagement of the "Cheech affair" spread far and wide. Delta council was outraged and immediately announced that the SPCA's dog catcher contract, worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, would not be automatically renewed. The story was repeated over and over in all the media for weeks, in fact the story still "has legs" because now the media is actually watching the SPCA like a hawk. The damage done by the SPCA to itself is incalculable, but we know that it is second only to the revelation in 2001 that the CEO of the Vancouver SPCA was making $204,000 plus perks that may have added up to over $250,000 a year. In our daily communication with people, we have not once met anyone who does not remember that. Even people who know nothing about the SPCA tell us that they have never made another donation after they heard that. We heard the same after the Cheech incident. In both cases, AAS had nothing to do with the SPCA's self-immolation. The SPCA did it to itself. If the SPCA sues anyone, it ought to be the people who were involved in the Cheech incident. [See the whole Cheech incident at www.animaladvocates.com]

In Delta, Amanda Muir and other staff were committed to getting all the vet care needed for an animal in its care - just like real animal welfarists. They refused to be limited to $200 per animal that the SPCA permitted, when so many needed more money than that to be made whole and well. Remember, the SPCA has revenues of around $20 million a year. So Amanda would give a story of a special dog who needed a lot of money to be made well to the media and in other ways raise the money needed. [See http://www.animaladvocates.com/cgi-bin/newsroom.pl/read/6154]

The Delta vets who did work for the SPCA at discount rates and sometimes for free, didn't have their bills paid, month after month. The vets trusted the SPCA because of Amanda, but finally they got fed up and held a meeting with the SPCA in which they made it very clear that they were being put in the position of considering going to the media. Still they did not get paid. Not until the Cheech incident and then suddenly, they were paid! The way the SPCA handled the Cheech incident meant that the media were going to be interested in all kinds of complaints that they may not have been interested in before. The mishandling of the Cheech incident is the SPCA at its plainest. And the SPCA did this to itself. Cheech is just one of hundreds of proofs that the SPCA does not do animal welfare.