Keep it Simple!
Posted on 8/25/2002 at 08:05:53 AM by AAS

On the CYA messageboard CYA director Brigitta MacMillan wrote in defence of continued SPCA pound-contracting: "Each municipality may have different ideas about what's acceptable. And if they don't do right by the animals, who will address that? How?"

Two answers: (1) Each municipality's animal-loving voters, and (2) SPCA written and enforced Provincial Animal Control/Impound Standards.

Point (1): This is not the old days where people paid no attention to what their pound is doing or when a few angry women tried for years and could do nothing to change what they knew was wrong. Two big changes have taken place in the last ten years: (a) The world is full of animal activists now, and (b) they are all connected to each other via the internet. So there's no escaping: every animal is being watched, all the self-servers are being exposed.

You might answer that the SPCA could stay in pound contracting and be watched the same way. Three answers come to mind: (1) Municipalities are smaller and easier to watch: local people can attack local problems at their animal control: the bigger the business the harder to track and change, and the SPCA is as big as the province; (2) local government has weekly council meetings open to the public and the media, where citizens can stand up and say what they know, loud and clear and rally local support to make change. (This is very different than the secretive and unresponsive SPCA that this board describes); (3) The SPCA is supposed to prevent cruelty, period. It only added pound contracting to its mandate fifty years ago. All pounds must eventually kill excess dogs because a pound's legal duty is to control dogs (stray and dangerous) and cannot keep impounded dogs forever that no one will buy, or which are dangerous. (That is the purpose of the SPCA's disastrous new "animal assesment protocols" - to justify the killing that pounds must do and which, because of the internet, cannot any longer be hidden.) A secretive Society that provides dog control will be corrupted into more secrecy and dishonesty, like the assessment protocols, by the necessity to kill that is required in the dog control business, and it can easily be further corrupted by the desirability for cost-effective impound facilities, creating the cheap SPCA hell-holes we all abhor. We do not think it is feasible for any Society to mix the two and keep clean and uncorrupted.

Point (2): The SPCA should be the writer and enforcer of Provincial Animal Control/Impound Standards, not dirtying its hands with animal control. To be both an animal-welfare Society and in the pound business is a conflict of interest that cannot but result in corruption and secrecy, the very things the CYA board points out daily. As long as the SPCA's hands are dirty with pound contracts there will only be a flashy, media-friendly new version of the old SPCA. All those SPCA employees worrying about their jobs, who say they hate this part of their job, should be encouraging the SPCA to reform and sending their resumes to municipalities.

CYA says it wants the SPCA to reform, but the SPCA cannot reform while it is still dragging the anchor of animal-control which CYA defends.

Keep it simple! There is no way that any of us can effectively watch the SPCA juggle pound business/ animal welfare all over this province, but the SPCA itself is big enough to watch pounds, whether they be municipal or private. What does CYA expect the SPCA to do if it stays in pound-contracting... watch and report with its right hand what its left hand is doing? The SPCA can do one or the other - but not both honestly. Keep it simple!

This is a crucial ethical question that needs to be thoroughly understood by all animal-lovers. The BC SPCA may be voting on whether to remain in animal control contracting this Fall. The SPCA needs to be urged to separate itself from this business and instead to be the overseer of pounds in BC.

Let us know what you think.