Heather Pettit has raised a very interesting point. Animal welfare services, unglamorous and almost entirely unnoticed by the media, have been cut to the bone by the SPCA. But there is a lot of money for a media attracting pet-shuffling van that does not address a single underlying cause of the reason the SPCA exists. In fact, it can be reasoned, as astute posters on this board have pointed out, that the shuffle van perpetuates the problem by giving the false impression that there are enough homes for homeless animals. Real animal welfarists know this is not true, even if we didn't hear the SPCA say it so often.

No one may ever know how much money the SPCA is sinking into the shuffle-mobile since it won't produce informative financial statements, so we will have to make guesses as we always do about what the "open, accountable and transparent" BC SPCA is doing and how much it is spending and on what. Guesses can be right, or half right, or wrong, but the SPCA's secrecy means that real animal welfarists have to draw conclusions based on (sometimes) incomplete information.

We conclude, not unreasonably, that the SPCA is going to spend a lot of donator's money, helping to perpetuate a problem.

But, if the van's purpose is two-fold, to One: help the outlying branches stop the killing for space of perfectly sellable animals (something SPCA Head Office has been denying it does in a hundred statements in the media, since announcing in March 2002 that it was going to stop doing that, but which some Branch Managers have openly admitted to in their local media), and Two: raise funds for a comprehensive sterilization program that will address the root cause of pet killing by the SPCA, and to pay vet and rehabilitation bills for the animals that are not sellable until some money is spent on them, then we cannot fault it. Every animal welfarist must raise money for their work and spending some money to raise more money is sensible. Except at the garage sale level, we all do this.

Until there is a clear accounting by the SPCA of where it gets its money and where it spends its money, we will continue to have to publish suspicions, SPCA lawyers be damned!

And we suspect that the SPCA has, or will, spend half a million dollars on lawyers to silence real animal welfare critics instead of silencing us by spending the money doing real animal welfare.