From a post on the CYA messageboard: "The SPCA charges you money if you want your pet dead. It has been criticized for that as well. It’s a no win situation for them. Charging money fits in with AAS ideology but they say the SPCA should not do it."

That is not AAS's position. AAS has said that not one employee at all the Vancouver SCPA branches offered any suggestions on how to rehome a cat or dog when we phoned to see what the SPCA says to the surrenderer for euthanasia of a healthy, friendly pet. In every case, AAS was merely quoted the rates.

AAS thinks it should be hard to surrender a pet to be euthanised to any agency whether it be a pound, an SPCA or a vet. It should never be done without offers of alternatives, and often, refusal. It can be made more difficult by a hefty fee. (There should of course be reductions in the fee for low-income pet owners.)

After ten years or so of surrender being made difficult for the surrenderer, public perception will change - slowly - but it is the only way it will change. Take public smoking for example. It wasn't until smokers were NOT ALLOWED to blow smoke into someone's air that this health hazard was stopped, and now after ten years, no one even tries anymore. All the people who didn't like smoke in their faces weren't able to stop anyone from doing it by just chastising or "educating" the individual smoker, just as all the animal lovers at the SPCA and rescue groups have never, and will never, stop the dumping they hate by pointing out to the individual dumper that they aren't being nice. We think if anyone should understand that enabling euthanasia and surrender hurts animals, it should be the people at the SPCA who complain on this board about how heartless surrenderers can be. But these are the people who say that they must keep doing it, for the sake of the animals. That thinking is not clear in our opinion, and it is the lack of clarity that has entrenched the problems that we all struggle with, in our own ways, and will forever if we don't stop assisting people to do what we say we know is wrong.

We've read on this board, and heard for years, how ineffectual it is for SPCA staff to try to dissuade surrenders from surrendering, even showing them the grim cells and telling that their pet would likely huddle in terror and loneliness until it was put down, but that the owner simply wanted someone to take or kill their pet and couldn't get out of the building fast enough. That approach is the "education" approach, but it seldom works, and those of us in hands-on rescue for long, know of the pet-shopper who comes to us looking for a new pet after they "got rid of" the previous one. AAS believes it was so easy and cheap to get rid of the unwanted pet that the owner doesn't think twice about doing it again. SPCA staff themselves complain about the people who surrender their pets when they leave on holidays rather than pay boarding fees. It is incomprehensible to AAS that anyone who claims to be working, paid or not, for the welfare of animals, would object to making it hard to surrender a pet.