by PATRICK LEJTENYI

A group of West End neighbours aren't happy with the SPCA. The Macdonald Park residents were shocked and dismayed when, on Friday, July 18, they learned that the two baby raccoons one of them had entrusted to the SPCA's care the previous Sunday had been summarily euthanized.

Allen Reith says he was walking his dog the afternoon of Sunday, July 13, in Macdonald Park when he found the two raccoons. "It was a fluke, really," he says. "I found them in the wedge of a tree, maybe three feet off the ground, curled up on each other, crying and trying to get away." When he came back over a half-hour later, he found them in much the same situation. Concerned that the kits' mother had been killed (otherwise, he reasons, she would have shown herself by then), he picked them up and brought them to his nearby home. He fed and watered them while he conferred with his animal-loving neighbours, and waited for an SPCA agent to pick them up.

"The SPCA girl was really sweet and nice and said that they'd keep them for a week or two," he says. "She told us they'd take them to a zoo or a farm to be rehabilitated and that they'd be better off than they would be in the city. So I signed the release form and put them into their care."

When he called the following Friday, he was told that they had been euthanized the previous Monday. Reith was livid. Not only for being lied to, he says, but also because his neighbours had offered to find farms for the animals or look for other places that would take care of them.

Dishonesty the best policy?

Pierre Barnoti, the SPCA's executive director, says his employee had to tell Reith and the others what they wanted to hear, and not necessarily the whole truth, in order to do what needed to be done. "We do not venture to scare people off," he says. "But if a person is prepared to hear the whole process, we'll explain it."

Nevertheless, he says, the kits, if they were indeed motherless, were doomed, and neither love nor money could have saved them. He says that the babies were runts and therefore consigned by nature to a premature death. Furthermore, by interfering in the Darwinian process, he says Reith not only could have gone on to be the godhead of a line of weak raccoons, but also could have brought pollutants from the city into the wild. Simply feeding and watering the animals wouldn't have saved them, he continues. Without essential education learned from their mother, they would have probably starved to death or been killed in a fight with a raccoon whose territory they were violating. Héloïse Bastien, a biologist from the provincial Société de la faune et des parcs du Québec backs him up.

But other animal advocates do not. Andrew Plumbly, director of animal rights group Global Action Network, called the killings "pointless." If the SPCA couldn't take care of the raccoons, he says, there are other organizations that would. "Lots of groups are doing things like this successfully, at relatively little cost," he says. "You don't need a lot of know-how."

Nathalie Karvonen, the executive director of the Toronto Wildlife Centre, says that rehabilitating urban animals is relatively easy and fairly common. But she says the SPCA's lying "makes me feel very uncomfortable. We are very careful to be honest and forthcoming with the public. In my personal opinion, it's important. At the very least, if a person knew that we couldn't take the animals, they would have the option to look around for someone who could."