Damned if they do - damned if they don't. The media in the Lower Mainland and the major media is now frequently quoting people who question the SPCA's motives, practices and honesty. It never did until after the revelation of the $204,000 salary of one of the SPCA's top dogs, and even then the media treated that as a "lapse" that the honest SPCA would fix. But the Sun's articles on the SPCA raid on Forgotten Felines and SPCA ""Auschwitz" for Animals" started to educate the media. And after the P.R. nightmare of the Cheech incident, driven to a fever pitch by the temper of the CEO, the media not only lost its innocence, but it smelled blood.

The SPCA's dishonest and unorganized law enforcement has increased the P.R. mess caused by those stark revelations of anti-animal welfare policy, and that mess is going to get worse soon. The SPCA seizes and then neglects animals, horses included. It returns horses in much worse physical condition than when they were seized (some were not sick at all), yet it gets courts to make people pay many thousands of dollars to the SPCA for harming, or selling, or killing their animals. A clear reading of the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act shows it was drafted with the welfare of animals in mind. The Act is abundantly clear that animals should be left where they are if at all possible, and the on-site conditions and health improved. The SPCA's own Manual confirms that. In almost every case, seized animals suffer far more from the seizure than they do from the conditions they are in that are less than perfect, but which are familiar.

Sometimes the SPCA leaves clearly suffering animals where they are even after the owners have not heeded warnings to correct the conditions that are causing the distress that is the alleged offence. But confusingly, sometimes it seizes animals even though the owner is provably taking care of the condition that the SPCA says is causing the distress. In one case the SPCA wrote on its Offence Warning Notice that some horses' hooves needed trimming. The inspector wrote that while the owner's farrier was in the process of trimming the horses hooves, right in front of the inspector. In court, SPCA inspectors have been unable to produce any notes of the conditions that it claims warranted the seizure, and then says it can't remember the details that the owner is being charged with. The SPCA has obtained a warrant to seize based on a fabricated complaint. The SPCA brings ignorant, untrained staff or hangers-on to seizures who have so little knowledge that in one case they drove a horse into bog and in another case, caused a horse to panic and run face-first into a fence, and when the horse fell on its back, blood streaming out of its nostrils, the SPCA's ignoramuses roped its back leg, preventing it from getting up. It was going to drown in its own blood. The owner had to furiously rescue her horse from the ham-fisted SPCA. SPCA animal law enforcers admit to not being properly trained in animal welfare. Some who seize horses have so little knowledge of horses that the horses' health declines rapidly while in the custody and "care" of the SPCA.

That is not the first or the only time that people have had to rescue animals from the SPCA. There are thousands of women all over BC dedicated to rescuing animals from the SPCA. We have traced this back more than fifty years. Almost more than anything else, this proves that the SPCA did not do animal welfare as it got millions of dollars by saying it did.

Others have had to "rescue" their seized animals from the SPCA, but they had to pay thousands of dollars to keep the SPCA from selling or killing their animals and in some cases they have been forced to sign confidentiality agreements, preventing them from telling the media about the SPCA's tactics..or else!

This is the kind of person who CEO Craig Daniell has hired and promoted to wield the SPCA's frightening powers. This is an abuse of statute power, and everyone, animal owner or not, ought to be concerned.

The SPCA has claimed in court that the holes that all dogs dig in the dirt are "dangerous" and that a log is "dangerous" and are grounds for seizure. The SPCA claims in a court of law, where people's whole lives hang in the balance, that matting is grounds to criminalize them in a court and demonize them in the media, painting them as heartless monsters. The SPCA uses the law and its money like a blunt instrument to bludgeon its human victims into defeat and silence. It ruins their lives by months and years of unremitting and heartless pursuit and legal tricks in the courts, which the SPCA can afford and which almost no one else can. This is a frightening abuse of power - the power of the SPCA's money and lawyers. The SPCA is using its money and power to try to stop AAS from informing the public of all this.

There are no discernable standards or procedures when SPCA enforcers come inspecting. They almost never bring a vet. They will deliberately seize before the owner can get their own vet to the scene to confirm that the animals in question are being treated. They will seize on grounds of "possible" harm. They seem sometimes to deliberately time their seizure for when the owner is not at home.

Some vets who witness the abusive way the SPCA enforces the Act are shocked and angry. A growing body of lawyers are out to get the SPCA for its abuse of power, an abuse that ought to frighten every animal owner in BC. And when judges begin to understand that they are not dealing, as they thought, with an honourable organization that has the welfare of animals as its only concern, the SPCA will be reined in and control imposed on it. Until that happens, or until politicians are convinced that the Act must be amended, that there must be recourse for the SPCA's victims, and that there must be independent oversight of an organization that has been protected from scrutiny for over one hundred years by a wrongly worded Act , the SPCA will probably go on making harmful seizures. We say that because it has not demonstrated self-control to date.

The only charitable view of people who hold the smug opinion that all the owners of animals the SPCA seizes are getting what they deserve is that those people just don't have enough information.

To serve the public interest this web site is going to inform everyone it can of the appalling tactics that the PCA Act permits an agency that has shown over and over that it lacks the self-control that the Act assumed and trusted it would exercise.