The SPCA is BULLSHIT

I just want to take a moment away from philosophizing to express my utter rage at the local Society for the 'prevention' of cruelty to animals. A friend was forced to place her cat there due to moving in to a building that doesn't allow pet occupancy (another bullshit control mechanism that I could go on about). My SO and I had planned to adopt this cat, at least until her owner was in a position to be able to house her in the domicile. This was agreed on a week ago, and they just wanted to wait until the holidays were over to deal with all of the paperwork, vet visits etc. Well today they contacted the SPCA, only to learn that the cat was put down 2 days ago! The story they werte given (after first being told that she had 'signed away the rights' to her beloved companion and thus had no grounds to protest) is that the cat developed a 'respiratory infection' (which I am assured is fairly easily treatable) and had to be murdered before it could spread. Now, I'm fully aware that it is sometimes sadly necessary to end the lives of animals to prevent their further suffering (and should be for people to, but again that's a post for another day). But there are steps that could have been taken first! If they had just called our friend and informed her, we would have been in there like a shot. Well, now it's too late to do anything but grieve. We're getting ready now to go down there and claim the remains, hopefully before they get shipped off to mass cremation without the owner's knowledge or permission! While we're there we'll be trying to find out just who's responsible for this decision.