----- Original Message -----
From: Animal Advocates
To: JKnox@tc.canwest.com
Sent: Thursday, October 14, 2004 9:26 AM
Subject: Fw: Victoria does have suffering chained dogs

Dear Mr Knox,

I can confirm Carol Sonnex's assertion that real animal welfarists do not rescue a dog until it has been observed and documented over time and every legal option has failed. I have to wonder why a dog was tied up for hours outside a store, but I would have found out why, not taken it. And I have to question why Ebi was unattended in a yard at all. No dog should be. They escape and make trouble for neighbour dogs, cats, kids and gardens, if they don't get hit by a car. They often become too protective and become aggressive. They bark and get poisoned. And they get lonely. Dogs were bred over many thousands of years specifically to be companions, and they suffer terribly from isolation. And I would question if Jeff left Ebi out just this once, or was Ebi alone in her yard most of the time?

Hugh Coghill says the law cannot relieve a pet's mental distress and yet Craig Daniell, BC SPCA CEO, says in SPCA fundraising publications that the SPCA does seize dogs for "psychological neglect". Maybe they should talk to each other.

Coghill says laws need to be improved, and blames the stalled amendments to the Criminal Code. The SPCA has been blaming "inadequate" laws for it leaving dogs in the most egregious filth, isolation, and illness, for fifty years, but it has never sought changes to the PCA Act that would permit it to seize these dogs. In fact, it stopped our Society, Animal Advocates, from having the provincial government make improvements that could have made chaining of dogs a lot harder to do.

Coghill also says that his law wouldn't allow anyone without a half an acre to own a dog. Were you surprised to learn the depths of ignorance about dogs by a senior SPCA official? I know from reading other of your articles that you are a dog-lover and so I think you must know that a dog only needs a yard big enough to pee in and wants its fun and exercise to be with its family at a park or a lake or hiking . A dog wants to be where its family is, and every dog knows that none of the rest of its family is put in the yard and the door shut. What does Mr Coghill imagine a dog is going to do with a half acre? Cultivate it? Landscape it? (Well, maybe that one, if you call digging holes out of boredom landscaping.)

Mr Coghill's ignorance about dogs' needs is abysmal, but common at the SPCA. Its own web sites have recommend that some dogs will be "happier" in a yard 24/7, even recommending tethering for some of them, even in the North of the province. That hardly jibes with Coghill saying that the SPCA would stop this, if only it weren't for that pesky lack of laws, the excuse that the SPCA has given the media for fifty years. (Fifty years is not rhetoric - we have the old newspaper clippings and we have hundreds of examples since then.)

Mr Coghill's views are representative of red-necks everywhere. But what are these views doing at the SPCA anywhere, much less at the upper levels of management? I hope you will take a moment to question what Coghill told you. And if you have another moment, to look at this AAS web page of cartoons that show that dog rescue has gone mainstream everywhere, for the same reason it is getting more common here: that the agencies that are supposed to be rescuing these dogs only pretends to: http://www.animaladvocates.com/cartoons-chained-dogs.htm, and at this page that recounts some local rescue stories: http://www.animaladvocates.com/women-who-steal-dogs.htm.

Please don't discount real rescuers as "vigilantes". My personal experience is that they run the gamut from senior crown prosecutors, lawyers, police officers, university professors, and wealthy Shaughnessy matrons, to grandmothers and single mothers on welfare. Some are men, but most are women. Not one of them is "radical", not one of them would willingly break a law.

Judith Stone, President,
Animal Advocates Society of BC
www.animaladvocates.com
604-922-1813

This is just one dog that the SPCA said it could not seize, so it was rescued...by an SPCA volunteer....