More dogs, more big dogs, tough breeds that didn't exist a few decades ago, more people who think they and their dogs are entitled to do anything they please, makes these laws inevitable. Municipal and Provincial lawmakers have a primary duty to protect the public. Collecting and spending money on social and physical infrastructure is the second duty. There isn't a third duty.

A pound is the agency that carries out the duty to protect the public from dogs. Because of the proliferation of dogs, especially large, powerful, and dangerous breeds of dogs, lawmakers now have to carry out their duty to protect the public. It is very likely that soon pounds will no longer be permitted to return or sell any dog that shows any aggression while in impoundment, or return or sell any dog of designated breeds. No decent lawmaker wants to be responsible for another Cody or Shenica. Consequently, pounds may be disposing of many more dogs in the next few years.

"It's a dirty job, but someone has to do it", has never been truer, because dog rescuers are no longer able to cope with the huge number of dangerous and large dogs that need help. Pit bull rescue is a joke. There is no Rottweiler rescue. There will be no Cane Corso or Fila mastiff rescue when they start showing up. Rescuers can't even begin to cope with all the German shepherds that need rescuing. Pounds will be the bad guys, but pounds are only the symptom, not the cause of what is wrong.

Things got to this point in the usual way, by self-serving on the part of the agencies involved. Lawmakers, charged with protecting the public, protect their own political futures by avoiding the wrath of voting dog-lovers... until enough children pay enough.

The self-serving SPCA got into the pound business fifty years ago, making many millions of dollars carrying out the dog disposal work that is not in any way part of its mandate to protect animals from humans. No one was more ruthless or cruel or efficient at this job than the SPCA and so they won many contracts all over BC.

While the SPCA was expanding and running its dog disposal contracting empire, it did no animal welfare. This created an animal welfare vacuum that thousands of women filled, and not surprisingly, that many pounds tried to fill also. We say not surprisingly, because so many people had come to hate the SPCA's cruel business methods, that a movement to stop using the SPCA to control and dispose of dogs sprung up, and the new municipal pounds that replaced the SPCA were more animal welfare directed.

The self-serving SPCA did not ever try to stop the proliferation of dog breeders who bred the dangerous breeds and unwanted cross-breeds that the SPCA's multi-million dollar contracts paid it to dispose of. It did not ask for breeding controls. It did not try to stop the Protection Dogs business. It did not try to stop the desocializing of dogs on chains etc. It just kept disposing of these dogs for money.

Protecting the public from dogs is antithetic to the SPCA's real mandate to protect animals from humans. But there is not enough money in true animal welfare for huge salaries and new vehicles and jaunts to Europe. There is millions in dog control and disposal though, and many more millions in the pet recycling business, if you do not let animal welfare screw up the bottom line. No one who does real animal welfare, like vet care, rehabilitation, careful screening, home checks, and shelters that are animal-comforting, not cold, efficient prisons, makes money.

The SPCA, very successfully for five decades, passed off disposal (dog control and used pet recycling) as animal welfare. But nothing lasts forever and its fraud caught up with it in the late 1990's when animal lovers banded together to have their municipalities stop contracting with the SPCA. Since then the SPCA itself has, in many unmistakeable ways, shown other municipalities why they should no longer contract with it, but most notably by displaying its underside in the Cheech Affair.

It is not the SPCA's mandate to kill dogs that might be dangerous. It is its mandate to stop the breeding of so many large breed dogs that no one wants once they are surrendered, or that are inherently dangerous, or that suffer on chains and in dog-fighting. It is its mandate to rehabilitate the victims of abandonment and cruelty. Instead it made money by selling them or killing them. And in order to protect itself from bite law suits, and to make sure its pounds didn't get clogged with needy, costly dogs, it devised a test to fail any dog that wasn't quickly and safely sellable. The SPCA claims its test is scientific, but will reveal no data to prove that it is. On reading, the test is clearly nothing to do with dog welfare, but is a test that is designed to fail the most numbers of dogs. If further proof were needed that the SPCA's test serves its dog disposal business, not dog welfare, the test instructions say that dogs are to be killed for space whether they do well on the test or not.

Dog disposal will always be necessary to protect the public as long as the SPCA is involved in that business, instead of working to stop the numbers of dogs that society must kill.

In spite of the SPCA's 2001 Community Consultation Report that recommended the SPCA get out of the pound contracting business, naming all the reasons that AAS has named many times, the SPCA has fought tooth and nail to hang onto its contracts.

What hope is there for real animal welfare in BC with the Boards and Executives that have run the BC SPCA since the Community Consultation Report was released?