August 2003

THE SECOND LEGAL THREAT BY THE BC SPCA TO TRY TO SILENCE AAS

The first time was in January 2000. The law firm of Owen Bird was hired to threaten AAS founder and president Judy Stone with personal ruin if she did not remove all material alleged to be defamatory by the BC SPCA. Stone could not be intimidated and posted even worse accounts of SPCA actions in her internet response to Owen Bird, in which Stone said that she would temper the AAS web site to reflect reform at the BC SPCA, if it reformed. AAS only asked that the SPCA stop serving itself and start serving animals; that it use the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act to prevent cruelty; and that it promote animal welfare - as its millions of donators thought it was doing. read here.

The second time was October 2002 when the law firm of Lawson Lundell was hired to intimidate Net Nation, AAS's web server, into shutting down the AAS web site. It would have worked - NetNation preferred to fold on us rather than involve itself in a legal battle - except that once again, Stone proved that since the BC SPCA said it would reform, it's own actions precluded the trust in its honesty that AAS required in order to remove the material the SPCA disliked so much.

The SPCA still does not appear to understand what AAS has told it repeatedly: That AAS does not expect reform to happen quickly - the legacy of fifty years of dog control/disposal contracts is too entrenched in the attitudes of the employees hired to dispose of dogs for money while pretending to be doing animal welfare and prevention of cruelty. The legacy of deceit, misleading the public, hiding the finances, hypocrisy, self-serving, secrecy, and other dishonesties may take as many as five years to change.

AAS founder Judy Stone knows how hard it is to change a work culture because before founding Animal Advocates Society she founded a roofing contracting company and roofing is one of the dirtiest, most dangerous, most dishonest trades of all. Stone's experience being a roofing contractor is what allowed her to see that the SPCA had become a animal disposal contractor, and that prevention of cruelty, promoting animal welfare, humane education, and advocating for animals had been all but supplanted by its contracting business.

Stone knows that the BC SPCA must rid itself of the old guard dog-disposal employees who won't move with the times, who prefer to go on disposing of dogs (and cats and other little animals) and that these employees have been fighting with every dirty trick they can find. We know that the bosses of the Vancouver SPCA's pound contracting empire signed an agreement with the SPCA's union that obliges the SPCA to bid on every pound contract available in the lower mainland for ten years. There are other legacies of those decades of pound contracting:

* employees who do not know how to investigate cruelty because they were always discouraged from investigating

* employees who breed and sell dogs and cats (some who would fit the accepted definition of puppy mill and some who surgically mutilate their pups, against SPCA 'stated' policy) while being paid to 'dispose of' unsellable animals in the SPCA 'shelters' they work in (the SPCA discontinued this practice in 2003 but only after an unremitting offensive on the AAS web site. So far - the SPCA has only been reactive, not proactive. )

* discouragement and surly, intimidating treatment of volunteers by these employees

* a culture of killing that led to hidden atrocities

* a requirement of hypocrisy, the need to pretend to the public that they were animal-lovers when in fact they were animal-disposers

What AAS asked for immediately was honesty from the BC SPCA. But it has continued to misrepresent, dissemble, and mislead, and so AAS is forced by the SPCA's own choices to leave the incriminating material on our web site - because it is not possible to trust the BC SPCA when it is still making misleading announcements. See the statement from the newest BC SPCA CEO about "miracles in the branches" http://www.animaladvocates.com/cgi-bin/newsroom.pl/read/3324

In our letter to the SPCA's latest lawyers, Lawson Lundell (below) we showed that the BC SPCA has been acting in bad faith since AAS said it would temper its web site if and when the SPCA reformed, and that AAS has acted in good faith.

As we have said over and over, we do not want to have to do this draining job (emotionally and financially) forever. But mostly - for the sake of the thousands of animals that we cannot personally rescue, we want an SPCA that we can trust to really prevent cruelty, really prosecute animal abusers, really promote animal welfare, really do humane education, really control puppy mills and other breeders, really advocate for tougher laws, and really do the work that its donators pay it millions a year to do.

We await the BC SPCA to be what it says it is: open, transparent, and accountable. Honest reform - and trust - is not possible without that.