Once a year the BC SPCA holds a free feral sterilization day at its Vancouver clinic. It does about 18 cats.

Who is this in aid of? Not the feral cat rescuers, who are treated better by their private, for-profit vets than the SPCA treats them - or the cats for that matter.

I got one of my short, sharp lessons in what the SPCA really was twenty years ago when I was a cat-trapper on the North Shore, spending nights in my car waiting to hear the "clunk" of the trap door dropping, crawling through bushes to get sick kittens, nursing them through infections, and releasing the adults, sterilized and infection-free. I was told over and over by kind people who had feral cats in their lanes or garages that the SPCA said it will kill them all if they are brought in, and it would even lend the trap to catch them.

That was the SPCA's version of "speaking for those who cannot speak for themselves" - shutting them up - permanently.

It was bare, brutal, bald animal population control - not animal welfare. It was carried out by hundreds of SPCA employees all over BC for 50 years at least. What kind of people do you think were hired to kill hundreds of thousands of animals and did it willingly - at the same time telling sad stories to the media, with photos of their arms around an animal chosen for the photos?