This practice may be more prevalent than the public realizes as few people take their stories to the media and when they do, often the media aren't interested.

For me it's deja-vu all over again. Twenty years ago, I got a call from the distraught owner of a dog that had been killed by the North Vancouver SPCA/dog pound, even though the owner had done all the right things to get her dog home. She had called the SPCA pound every day, sometimes twice a day and she had faxed a notice to the SPCA pound. Her dog was easily identifiable. It wasn't until a friend told her that in her experience the SPCA didn't care if they had her dog or not and that she would have to go in and look in all the kennels, did she physically go to the SPCA. That is when a staff member told her, "Oh yes your dog was here, we just put it down because you didn't claim it before its time was up."

That "time" referred to was the days the SPCA was required to impound a dog before disposing of it, according to the terms of its multi-thousand dollar contract with the District of North Vancouver.

The dog was healthy, but elderly and large. Is that why it was killed rather than put up for adoption? If it had been put up for adoption, it would have gone back to its loving home and eventually died peacefully, as it deserved to.

In the twenty years since I listened to that sobbing woman, my heart breaking for her and for her old dog who spent its last days lonely and frightened in a concrete cell, its existence so unimportant to its "care-takers" that they couldn't even be bothered to go look in the kennels or keep the bare minimum of records, I have heard the same story more times than I want to remember.