Ongoing AAS research is showing, tentatively, that the SPCA is now, at last, having to practice some real animal welfare. The only real animal welfare model is one in which surrender is limited to only those animals for which every necessary assistance can be provided. Every animal in real animal welfare's care is given everything that one would give one's own pets. Taking every animal offered and then killing the ones that will cost money to make sellable, as the SPCA did for decades (and is still largely doing), is a business model, not a humane welfare model.

When I met with Mr Daniell, then the SPCA's new Manager of Cruelty Prevention, in January 2002, I came away with the strong impression that if Mr Daniell were CEO, he might drop animal welfare and only do cruelty enforcement.

But since Mr Daniell became CEO in 2003, I suspect that he understands now, if he didn't understand before (now that he sees the true facts of the SPCA's finances which were withheld from most of the Board and employees), that for the SPCA to get enough money, it has to appear to do a lot of animal welfare, because almost all of its revenue is from animal lovers who will not give to an organization that is not doing hands-on animal welfare. In my opinion, the BC SPCA always understood that, but it got away with having two ethically conflicting sources of its millions of dollars in revenue: contracted pet disposal (a business), very thinly disguised with the appearance of the other revenue source: animal welfare.

Thanks to the internet and AAS (and in no small measure, to the arrogant thinness of the SPCA's disguise), the SPCA can no longer get away with an appearance of animal welfare only. It either must either drop animal welfare, or do real animal welfare. If it does not, it will face more and more "Cheech" P.R. nightmares. It has proven itself to be so badly served by its CEO and its P.R. person, that it lost at least the dog control contract in Delta, when it insisted Cheech had to be killed, and when it insulted the Mayor and Council of Delta by saying that they didn't care about keeping Delta's children safe from dangerous dogs. The CEO and P.R. person's bizarre behaviour also damaged its chances of any more municipal contracts in the lower mainland. (The fact that the SPCA's P.R. person was not fired for that appalling insult is a sad comment on the current SPCA CEO and Board of Directors. Is there no degree of harm that SPCA employees can do that warrants firing? It would appear not, as the branch manager who was at the center of the Sun's huge article "A Prison Camp for Animals" is still working for the SPCA.

I have been watching the SPCA twist, squirm, lash out, lie, hide, sneak, bluff, blunder, use lawyers as blunt instruments to terrorize critics, fire CEO's, and drive away good employees and Directors, ever since it said it would reform animal welfare in 2001. It did everything it could to keep doing cheap, dishonest "animal welfare". It tried its damnedest to just reimage itself, not change itself. I've been confident from the beginning that if we didn't weaken, one day the SPCA would have no more holes to hide in, no more P.R. disguises, no more help from the media, and would have to be honest...or go under. There are no other choices for it. There never is. It's an old story. A lie has a limited life span, the truth is limitless. The SPCA's big lie was limited on the day in 1997 that I figured out it was nothing but a pet disposal business disguised as an animal welfare Society, and I set out to prove it. After three years of undercover investigation and documentation of the SPCA, the AAS web site was created and in May 2000 the proof was published. We've been doing that almost daily ever since.

I knew it would take a long time to get to the goal of making the SPCA honest because the lazy and uninquisitive media repeated what the SPCA said about us, that we were wild-eyed "activists"; that it hated to have to kill all those animals, but it was a dirty job that someone had to do and they were the brave "saints" who nobly do this. It was the unquestioning media that slowed the process of reform down and kept the SPCA in its disposal business, and even now it is letting the SPCA get away with the most egregious misuse of its powers to seize and prosecute. But in the Lower Mainland and the Victoria area, the media has smelled something fishy and has even drawn blood a few times, especially over the Cheech incident. Less and less is the media in the SPCA's pocket. The writing is on the wall for anyone to read: the media is being lost because of the intemperate actions and doubtful words of the BC SPCA's CEO and P.R. person.

I also realized that reforming the SPCA would take a long time because, even though it announced it would reform in May 2001 after its first SLAPP attempt in January of that year failed to scare me into silence (in fact, my response to the SPCA lawyer's threatening letter was to post even more evidence), and even though it held meetings around the province to get input into what animal lovers wanted the SPCA to be and produced a laudable report from those meetings, it began doing every sneaky, dishonest thing it could to protect its pet disposal empire for as long as it could. It reimaged its animal welfare instead of reforming its animal welfare.

During the long and twisting process of reform, thousands of innocent animals suffered and died at the SPCA. Being able to picture all those innocents, in those horrible SPCA cells, surrounded by fear and disease and death, while SPCA fat cats took trips, and bought themselves posh vehicles, and worked to rule, and went on jaunts to Europe, and paid themselves handsomely... all that kept me determined to never give up, and to win by refusing to give in to their legal terror tactics. The only way to win for the animals was by goading and prodding the SPCA and its lawyers from one dishonest hole to another until there were only two holes left to chose: its own destruction or doing real animal welfare.

Self-preservation seems to have won. It appears that the SPCA is starting to practice a halting and very imperfect version of animal welfare. Its Petcetera shuffle bus is very questionable ethics. Certainly, without SPCA local spay/neuter assistance (and there is none) it is just more P.R. grandstanding. But if, when Mr Daniell has the money, he starts to spend it on community sterilization programs, then the shuffle bus is a wonderful adjunct to animal welfare. Perhaps shuffling sellable product (the SPCA's own word for the animals in its cells) is the only improvement that the SPCA could afford at this time because Petcetera is paying for some of it. But if, when there is the money, and it is not spent on spay/neuter, then the bus is just for "selling more product", and is not animal welfare.