An early AAS page was just that: that the SPCA must not be a poundkeeper, but must be the pound inspector. To do that, it must write Poundkeeping Standards. If the SPCA cannot get the Standards into law, then the SPCA can recommend to municipalities to include the Standards as part of its contract tenders. The implication is clear: crummy pounds will get inspected a lot.

The SPCA has had 50 years of pound contracting in which to draft Standards and change the cruel conditions that pound animals are kept in. It never has. Why is that? We can only conclude that it did not want to improve its own pounds. Why not? It had plenty of money before it went into the hole in the last three years because spending on itself went stratospheric. It had enough money to pay one CEO over $204,000 a year, and to give employees new personal use vehicles every year, and for world-wide jaunts, and retreats at posh resorts and all the other trappings of corruption. And it is still so flush that it can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to try to silence us.

We even wrote that the SPCA ought to be paid by government to enforce the Standards, as we have written that the SPCA should be paid by government to enforce the PCA Act, instead of having to get the money from donators. It was this last circumstance that we alleged corrupted the SPCA.

So why didn't it spend money improving its own pounds and "shelters" and kennels, so that it could ethically enforce Standards for all pounds and shelters and kennels, before it began seizing dogs from kennels that were much more humane than its own and began swooping down on shelters were animals were living in freedom from cages and much happier and healthier than the animals the SPCA keeps in its own diseased cages?

No real animal welfare Society would take animals away from one place to put them in a worse place, and yet that is what the SPCA has done, and/or has threatened to do, since Mr Daniell was hired away from the Ontario SPCA to fix the BC SPCA's shattered image as a preventor of cruelty, and to increase donations with media-grandstanding seizures from what it called puppymills. Apparently it worked and SPCA donations are up.

AAS has said publicly for four years that it wants a financially strong SPCA so that it can effectively prevent cruelty and practice real animal welfare. But to get that financial strength dishonestly is not what we hoped for. We naively supported Mr Daniell for his first six months as BC SPCA Manager of Cruelty Investigations, on our messageboard and behind the scenes to many other groups and individuals, refusing to post many evidences that could have meant that his version of animal welfare and cruelty prevention was ethically highly questionable, arguing that Mr Daniell was not responsible for the behaviour that he had inherited and was covering up and that to publish the incidents would only make it harder for him to reform the SPCA if the SPCA were financially weak.

We continued to make excuses for Mr Daniell until the final straw was reached: his covering up of the cruelty incident at the Burnaby SPCA (read here: http://www.animaladvocates.com/Watchdog/PrisonCampForAnimals.htm). From there on it was downhill for our respect and support for Mr Daniell and it was downhill for the SPCA's image too, thanks to many of Mr Daniell's subsequent actions, not the least of which was the Cheech incident.