Seriously... has the SPCA improved at all?

Setting aside the appalling depths to which the SPCA plunged when in November 2003 it decided to start making seizures, we think (but we keep getting proved naive and wrong) that there has been some improvement in some areas. The SPCA stopped allowing staff, whose day job at the SPCA was to kill excess and unwanted animals, from breeding and selling more on the side, at least new employees can't. It's doing pre-sales sterilization in most branches most or some of the time. It is transferring more cats and dogs from the North and the Interior to the Lower Mainland instead of killing them, some of the time. It is opening a clinic in Prince George because the PG SPCA was a self-admitted "slaughter house". We only hope it operates more honestly than the Vancouver clinic did.

These changes are all things that the SPCA has been severely criticized for and so they appear to be critic driven - in other words the necessity for the critics the SPCA is trying silence is proven by every improvement the SPCA makes. It painted itself into this corner by never doing anything right. Now when it does something right, it only looks like it is reacting - not acting. It can't win in other words.

Whose fault is that though? It's own of course. It will be a long time until the SPCA is seen as proactive, not reactive. And it is never going to stop being criticized as long as it lies - about anything. After 50 years of animal-lovers trying to make the SPCA animal-serving, trust will take a long time to regain.