 All right, welcome. Really happy to see so many people here. My name is Vaughn Black. I teach here at the law school. One of the courses I teach some years, not this year, as it turns out, is a course in animals and the law. I want to start off by taking a little time just to convey what I hope to cover in the next hour or so. And that way, any of you came hoping for something else can leave right at the beginning and not be disappointed right at the end. I think these mini-law lectures, and I should say usually the dean shows up to introduce people, but she's busy tonight. I'd like to say I need no introduction. I think I probably do, but I'm not going to get one. But enough about me. Now, I think the main goal of these mini-law lectures is principally to convey some information. Most of them are given by colleagues of mine to give a rough idea of what they teach in some area that they commonly teach in. And that's principally what I hope to do this evening. I know a lot of people here have probably got some strong views on the subject about the rightness or wrongness of the current legal regime and its treatment of animals. I do too, just to put my cards on the table and fly my true colors. I don't think we treat animals nearly as well as we should. I think many of our customary practices with respect to them are not morally defensible. And I think there's a way in which the law not only permits but sort of facilitates and normalizes that. I would go further and say I think on the whole things are getting worse rather than better for animals on the legal front and have been for the last 40 years or so. And that's in contrast to what I would identify as a lot of the movements that might have originated say in the 1970s for legal change and social change with respect to subordinated groups. So I think here of the civil rights movement combating racial discrimination of the women's movement, of movements for rights for the disabled movements fighting homophobia and better treatment for mental disabilities and so on. I think of the animal rights movement that's fitting in with those. I think all the other movements have achieved real success. Success in terms of statutory changes, victories in the courtroom and I think also we'd all agree there's room for progress on all of those fronts, racial discrimination and so on that we've taken some real strides in the last 40 years or so. I don't think that's the case with the animal movement. As I say, I think things are getting worse but that's not principally what I want to talk about tonight. I'm not gonna try to get too much on the soapbox, just try to convey some information. But there is a second part to this evening that will start in an hour or so and that's a time for some discussion and I do hope we can use this as a good forum. There are people here who've got strong opinions one way or the other on this and I hope we can manage to have some sort of discussion, I hope respectfully about some of the issues that maybe arise with respect to the treatment of animals. Second thing I'd say about what's coming is the subject is vast. Perhaps I should have done a better job of giving a title to this talk that's less general than just animals and the law because the subject is big. I know bits about some part of it. I'm currently doing a lot of research on transportation of farmed animals which for the most part means the one ride they get from the farm to the slaughterhouse and the regulation of their comfort in that. So I think I know a fair bit about that but there are other areas that pertain to animals and the law about which I know a whole lot less about which many people in this room may know far more than I do. So let me try to give a sense of the areas in which I will be focusing this evening. I guess the first question is which animals are we talking about when we talk about animals and the law? The most ubiquitous ones on the planet I think are the one celled zooplankton. I'm not gonna talk about those. I gather that there's a real problem with their thriving these days with increasing acidification of the ocean and warming and that there may be a real problem with the ocean ecosystem because of the tough time that zooplankton are having but I'm not that much interested in one celled animals. So we'll be talking about the multicellular ones but more generally I want to focus on the animals that we imagine have got a mental apparatus sufficiently like ours so that we can say that they feel pain and maybe even beyond that suffering, stress, boredom and so on. And for the most part that would be I guess mammals. Probably birds as well, we'll speak a bit about birds. So there's a vast range between that. I'm not talking about insects. There are actually some fascinating legal issues related to bees but because I don't think bees suffer. There may be some doubt about that but at least that's my reading of the literature that they don't have the mental apparatus to experience what we would call suffering. I'm not particularly interested in them today. Appreciate there are a lot of borderline cases out there. One that I just want to raise but I won't talk about it is fish. Two weeks ago I appeared before a commission that some people may be aware of the Nova Scotia government is considering re-regulation of the agriculture industry and many people have appeared before that commission to talk about problems arising from agriculture. I think particularly they're focusing on the way that open pen agriculture wrecks the nearby terrain for lobster fisheries or that parasites will escape and contaminate the wild salmon. I made a pitch that in regulation of agriculture they should consider the welfare of the fish. We don't currently in Nova Scotia or Canada might interest you to know that some countries do. New Zealand in its regulation of agriculture has regulations that deal with the crowding and the slaughter methods for fish under their assumption that they probably do suffer or are capable of feeling pain in the same way that chickens and other animals that we do think are worthy of regulatory attention do. My sense is that's pretty much in doubt. I made the pitch that because it's in doubt we should give fish the benefit of the doubt until such time that we conclude that they don't feel any more pain than bugs do. But I'm not gonna spend a lot of time today on what I would call the marginal cases. So let's just talk about animals that I think most of us imagine can experience pain and suffering and I think that would include mammals and maybe it's a slight borderline case, birds. I wanna say that I'm not gonna be too narrow. I'm not just worried about cats and dogs. I think we, at least the subject of my talk this evening will pay attention to particularly farmed animals, the pigs and the mink and the mink farm, the mice and the rats that are subject to experimentation in this university and elsewhere. So I'm not sort of narrowing it just down to the animals that are parts of our family. So that's which animals I want to deal with. Let me state a couple of other ways in which what I'll address tonight is just a narrow part of things. First of all, I'm interested in the law of Canada and in particular Nova Scotia and there's lots of legal issues related to treatment of animals in other countries, in the course that I teach. I've had really good student essays on the regulation of bear farming in China and elephant human contact in Sri Lanka and so on but I wanna focus on the local neighborhood. Secondly, I'm not interested or won't talk tonight about history. There are lots of interesting changes in the regulation of the laws treatment of animals over the years and over the century and again in my course I've had interesting papers from students looking at the regulation of wandering cows and Halifax in the 1820s and the particular statutes that were brought to bear there but today, this evening anyway, I'll just focus on the present. There's not room to delve into the past. The other way in which I want to narrow things and I guess this is the final one is I'm particularly interested and we'll talk almost exclusively this evening about the parts of the law that regulate our treatment of animals in the interest of minimizing their suffering and pain. There's lots of issues that have to do with animals and the law that don't seem to me to have a lot to do with animal suffering and again if I can just illustrate from a couple of the subjects that students in my course have written papers in. They've written good papers on the laws approach to who gets the family pet on a marital breakdown and the parties are arguing about where the skippy should go with mum or with dad. They've good papers on how if somebody wants to leave a million dollars to their cat in their will they can use a trust to do so. Good papers on patenting of mice. Good papers on how we evaluate companion animals when they say killed and run over by a car. We've got lots of law on if a person is badly injured what dollar figure we put on that. What dollar figure do we put on the family pet who's run over. But I'm not gonna focus so much on those. I'm interested in the parts of the law that set limits on how badly we can treat non-human animals and focus on I guess trying to minimize or regulate the suffering or pain that they have to endure. So just to recap I'm not doing history I'm focusing on the here and the now and the regulation of treatment of animals. Where do we start then? Well typical Canadian where we start in a lot of law courses what is the constitution? Have to say about this before we get down to the court decisions and the statutes we have to figure out where the law comes from. And two main parts of the constitution that I think are pertinent to this discussion one is what we call the division of powers. Who gets to make the laws with respect to animal suffering? Is it the federal government and Stephen Harper and his group or is it Dexter or McNeil or whoever's gonna be in charge of Nova Scotia in a week time and also how much of that can be delegated to the municipality. So that's one part of it the division of powers and the second part is what if anything does the Charter of Rights have to say about questions of animal welfare? And let me just say a few words about each of those in turn. The division of powers with respect to animals in Canada is really complicated. I wish I taught animals and the law in New Zealand. In New Zealand they don't have provinces there's only one government so they don't have to worry about splitting it up. And they've got one big statute called the Animal Welfare Act and it deals with the use of animals and experimentation, the use of animals in farming, hunting, trapping, fishing, pets, all in one big statute. We can't do that in Canada partly because of the federal provincial split and finding a law on animals can be remarkably difficult. It's buried in seems like a hundred different statutes and regulations. Again partly because of the division of powers. Now a little bit of constitutional law. Animals are not mentioned in the Constitution Act 1867. It set up division of powers between the federal government and the provinces and said one can do property and somebody else can do regulation of banking and so on and so forth. The word animals does not appear there. It appears under several subheadings. For instance, although the word fish doesn't appear in the Constitution, fisheries does. The cow doesn't appear in the Constitution but agriculture does. That is, there are words in the Constitution that in particular the parts of the Constitution dealing with the division of powers that include animals and in fact pre commodified them. The Constitution doesn't care about fish, it cares about fisheries. Let me do a quick rundown of what I think the main heads of power are both with respect to the federal government and the provinces. First the criminal law power. Cruel, at least deliberately cruel, sadistic treatment of animals has long been considered a crime. The federal government can regulate with respect to criminal law and it's done so in criminal code and it's, we'll get to the details of that in a minute but it's got a power there to deal with animals. The federal government can deal with agriculture and it does so and it deals with animals and a lot of statutes under, it's power to deal with agriculture. It can deal with fisheries and it can deal there with fish but there's a whole range of other statutes. For instance, statute, the federal government's power to deal with international trade is the one that authorizes it to deal, to enter into treaties dealing with international trade and endangered species and enact legislation that try to protect worldwide trade in endangered species. So there's a long, fairly long list of federal government powers to deal that allow dealing with animals and likewise the provinces. The word animals doesn't appear in the list of what the provinces can do but their power to deal with them is considerable and it comes under principally one heading, property. The Nova Scotia government can deal with property in the province and it just so happens that animals are property and their power that we talked about the Nova Scotia's Animal Protection Act and their regulation of persons who cause distress to animals, that is constitutionally permitted under the provinces authority to deal with property and animals in the province are property. If you meet a bear in the woods, you probably don't think it's owned but the province says in its wildlife statute, we own all the bears and they get to do that because they can deal with property. So the provincial power to deal with property is a particularly powerful and important one when it comes to animals but there are others. The provinces can deal with agriculture too. You may remember that I mentioned that with respect to the federal government but it's a split power. There are provincial departments of agriculture and also some provincial powers with respect to some fisheries and they can deal with animals under those headings. Just in terms of actual administration, there aren't in this country sort of departments or ministries set up to focus on animals. And you might think, well, gee, that's obvious. There's no heading under the constitution dealing with animals so it's natural that things would be split but I don't think that's an accurate reflection. Take this example. The word environment doesn't appear in the constitution in 1867. It wasn't a commonly used phrase so that the powers of the federal government and the provincial government to deal with the environment have to, like the powers to deal with animals, be drawn from other headings and part of environmental regulation is based on the criminal law and other powers are based on international trade and so on. But the difference between that and animals, it seems to me, is we've organized our administration so that there's a federal minister of the environment. There's one place you can go to and that minister's powers to administer several bits of regulation traced down to a number of different sources in the constitution but we've decided there can be a minister of the environment. Well, there isn't a minister for animals and that's hard. If you go to Ottawa and you're looking for sort of who speaks for the animals, who you should go for or to, to look for regulation or improvement of the statute, there's about 20 differences. You've got to go to one agriculture to help the cows and department fisheries and ocean to help the fish and if you look for someone there who sort of got the animals as part of their portfolio, there isn't one. The animals are sort of, I think, legislatively under the constitution and administratively sort of chopped up into little bits and hidden here and there. So there isn't a comprehensive approach to, and maybe that's good, maybe that's bad, but it's a reality of the setup for the administration. What about the second part of the constitution? The charter, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It's certainly the most momentous legal change in my lifetime. What, if anything, is in it for the animals? The short answer is just about nothing. And that might seem obvious to you, but there are some countries in the world, Switzerland and Germany, who've tried expressly to address animals in their constitution. Germany 12 years ago now added three words to its constitution, und die Tier, and the animals. They added those words to a provision in their federal constitution that says the government shall treat everybody with dignity, all people with dignity, and they added words, and the animals, so that constitutionally, the state of Germany is obliged to treat the animals with dignity. Now, I don't know how that cashes out, they still farm them and eat them, but I guess constitutionally, they have to do so with dignity. So there are constitutions around the world, and the Swiss added one, that have thought that they could squeeze in something for animals in their parts of the constitution that deal with basic rights. Our charter doesn't do that. It's a bit open-ended. It says things like everyone has the right to life, liberty, and security of the person, but it's quite clear that everyone, although it includes people, doesn't include animals. It actually, in some situations, includes corporations too, which is, at least the courts have decided that certain charter rights are available to corporations. Most of them just to people, but none of them to non-human animals. And I think this fits in generally with the approach to human rights that we see in most documents. That is, rights generally are thought to be human rights and to stop at the edge of whatever we define as humanity. And just if I can just turn briefly from the constitution to another important document here, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, drafted by a Canadian, John Humphrey, and just a foundational document at the United Nations, starts off in its preamble in section one says, where is the recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom. So that rights are important, but it's all members of the human family and not to anybody else. And Article One, I think, emphasizes that even more clearly. Article One, it's a very important sort of foundational commitment to human rights that is responsible for a whole lot of good changes in the last 50 years says, all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience. Among other things, that's manifestly false. Not all human beings do have reason. Newborns don't. Send old people don't. People with profound mental disabilities don't. But humans get counted just by virtue of being humans as entitled to these things. We can talk about whether animals had reason or not and should get counted in, but none of the foundational rights documents consider animals as part of that part of that group that's entitled to equal dignity and respect. So the charter doesn't do much for animals, but it does a little bit in a couple of ways. It's got an effect on our treatment of animals and the effect comes this way. It can protect human beings rights to use or not use animals in a certain way. And I'll give a couple of examples of that. The right that the charter provides to freedom of religion and conscience has been interpreted by a Canadian court to require the correctional service of Canada in the prisons to make available to persons who want them vegan and vegetarian meals on the basis that those prisoners say, I don't want to have to participate in the killing of animals that I would participate in if I had to eat meat. And I've got a right, and it doesn't have to be based on religion. It can just be based on a moral commitment to vegetarianism. You've got to write because of the charter's freedom of conscience, not to have to eat meat in the prison, but to still get a decent meal. So that the charter has been used in that way and a couple of others to, I think, indirectly have minor effects on animal welfare through the capacity of human not to be forced to use animals in certain ways. But, and I think you might have seen this coming, that's a two-edged sword because the charter can protect people's rights to use animals in ways that might otherwise seem cruel. The, it's not officially part of the charter, but part of the 1982 constitutional change preserved aboriginal rights. And that has been interpreted as not only rights to hunt and fish, but perhaps to kill animals in traditional ways. So if there are first nations groups who say, we have a right as part of our traditional heritage to kill whales in a way that wouldn't otherwise be permitted by the regulations around killing whales because it's too painful, they have that right as protected under section 35. So it can protect under that guys under aboriginal rights a right to use animals in a way that the law otherwise judges as unacceptable. And just to take another example for that, the provisions on slaughter of animals, the federal government regulates how animals have to be killed in slaughterhouses, provide a method and get into it that minimizes the pain that animals will suffer, but doesn't apply that for slaughterhouses that are done for kosher or halal reasons because the religious rights of certain groups require them, if they're gonna eat meat, don't require them to eat meat, but if they want to, if they want to eat meat that's only killed in a certain fashion. So they get, if you will, an exemption that down the road would appear to use animals in a fashion that's more cruel than the rest of us get to because of the preservation of their religious rights under the charter. So the charter's sort of a two-edge sort. It can help animals indirectly by people who want to try to benefit them, but it can make it rougher for animals with respect to certain other groups. Okay, that's it for the constitution. Let's turn to what the legislatures have done under those powers, and I particularly just wanna spell out the main provisions bearing on animal welfare. The principal one, the one that's longest standing is a provision in the Criminal Code of Canada, so federal legislation that says it's a crime, a very serious one, to use animals in a way that causes unnecessary cruelty, injury, or suffering. It's an overarching provision. It applies to pets and animals people own, but it applies as well and has been applied to animals that are being hunted. It applies to animals that are used in biomedical experimentation. It applies to animals on the farm. It doesn't actually say which animals it applies to, so, but we get back to that sort of who's in. I don't think it would be construed as protecting the rights of grasshoppers not to be crushed. And there hasn't been a lot of case law around that, but it's a long standing provision that applies to everything that counts as an animal and has done since the early days of Confederation, that the federal government had the power to enact this. It did in about, I'm sorry, Confederation 1867, it's about 1869 or 1870. They got right on it copying an English statute that had been enforced for about 40 years. And it's had slight changes over the years, but not that many. By and large, the provision that we have in the criminal code today against causing unnecessary suffering or cruelty to animals is the one that we've had from the beginning. There's been a few tweaks. I want to talk about that provision for a moment. It's the most overarching and important one, and it's the model for a number of other provisions that we'll look at in more detail in a minute. Obviously, sort of the weasel word there is unnecessary. It doesn't say it's a crime to cause suffering or injury to an animal. You just can't cause unnecessary suffering. So a lot then is gonna depend on the meaning given to the word unnecessary, and we can discover that meaning if we look at a few court cases. And I think I have to just describe a couple to, I'll do more than one, to give you the flavor of it. A prosecution was brought against a slaughterhouse that was slaughtering pigs for consumption and doing so in a way that the prosecutor thought involved unnecessary suffering. It didn't involve immediate loss of consciousness. They were hauling the pigs up by the hind leg and the chain and just swinging them against a wall and the death was not instantaneous, at least not in most cases. And it was a charge then of causing unnecessary suffering. They weren't convicted. The court didn't think that amounted to unnecessary suffering. And I think we've got to then follow the steps as to why not? Because you might say why is it necessary to kill pigs at all? It's not necessary to eat meat. I appreciate a lot of people like it. It's a good source of protein. It's really tasty, but you can get along without eating pigs The court said that the word unnecessary in the criminal code didn't mean that it had to be necessary to kill the pig. All that you had to require with respect to killing the pig was that you had a legitimate interest in it. So the court said quite clearly some people like to eat meat. It's a good source of nutrition. It tastes good. People are interested in eating meat. You can't eat pigs unless you kill them. So it's in effect necessary to kill pigs. So how could there be a charge for unnecessary cruelty? Well, the court said it's only unnecessary if you're doing it for no good reason. But we still might wonder why there couldn't be a successful prosecution there given that there are ways to kill pigs that involve less suffering. You might have to slow down the assembly line, but you could do it in a way that caused instantaneous loss of consciousness. The abattoir's argument on that point is it's necessary for us to do it this way to make a profit. Everybody else does it. If we slow down the assembly line to kill the pigs instantaneously, we can't compete with all the other slaughterhouses because we all do it this way. And it's therefore necessary for us to do it this way to stay in business. And the court said, fine. Then the suffering is not unnecessary. So the meaning of necessity doesn't mean that the harming of the animal or the injury has to be a necessary consequence. The harming just has to be something you've got an interest in, got an interest in killing animals. Let me just give another example to sort of drive it home. A charge brought against a rodeo when it was using to get its horses to buck something called a flank strap. And people may know more about rodeos than I do, but as I understand the flank strap, it's like a big belt that circles the horse around sort of under and quite close to their genitals and around their back. And just before you let the rider loose on the horse, you tighten it really hard and it pinches on the animal's genital area and it makes them buck more. So it's a deliberate causing of pain so that the animal will buck more than otherwise. And I appreciate there's a contention. Some people say, oh, they're big animals. It's just a minor discomfort. And I can't imagine somebody tightening a rope and whatever, it's enough to make them buck. And someone said, well, that's unnecessary cruelty. But again, there wasn't a conviction because again, the court's analysis is it's not necessary to have rodeos. That's not where the necessity comes in. But it's legitimate to have rodeos. It's family fun. It's like going to the movies or whatever. And the rodeo is able to say, if we don't make the horses buck a lot, nobody will come because the horses, they like to see a horse that bucks a whole lot. So that their argument is, we're not doing it because we're sadistic. That would be unnecessary. We're doing it because we're trying to make a profit. And again, all the other rodeos do it. And again, the court finds that the charge of causing unnecessary cruelty is not made out. And I think it's necessary then to understand the structure of that. For instance, in industrial experimentation, someone might be using animals and causing pain to them to put a new shampoo on the market. And do we really need another shampoo? Last time I was in Shoppers Drug Mart, there was a lot of choice in the shampoo aisle. Is it necessary to have a new shampoo? The argument, and it would be successful in beating that charge is, it's not necessary to have a shampoo, but I've got an interest in marketing it. I can make a profit for my shareholders and my employees get a job if I can put a new shampoo out there. But it's necessary to test it so that I don't get sued by humans if there's some new chemical that I'm using. If I've got a new shampoo, it's gonna be kumquat flavored and it'll compete because there isn't one out there, but who knows if kumquat flavor causes people's hair to fall out. So I get to experiment on animals in ways that cause pain to do that. So that wouldn't be unnecessary cruelty. So you might start wondering at this point, what is necessary cruelty? Well, it's sort of hard structurally to distinguish them, but here would be an example. A bunch of frat boys torture a cat and they're not doing it for profit, they're just doing it for kicks. That would amount to a charge of causing unnecessary cruelty under the criminal code. Now, you might sort of pause and wonder, well, if the rodeo can say we had a good goal, the only way we could make a profit and compete with other sources of family entertainment was to cause pain to a horse. Why can't the frat boys say the only way we can get our jollies is to torture a cat? I suppose they could. The courts just don't accept that. The courts, what's sort of important to understand, I guess, about the criminal code provision is that what keys on who's gonna get convicted and who's not is courts judgment about the legitimacy of the underlying activity. So if it's biomedical research or family fun like rodeos or eating meat, the activity is legitimate and as long as it's not accompanied by a sadistic treatment of animals, as long as in effect, you need to cut the corners and cause the pain to make your profit. You're not in violation of the criminal code, but we make judgments about sort of pure sadism that says that's not a legitimate activity and not covered. Now, I spent a lot of time on that provision for this reason. It's the ubiquitous model not only in Canada, but elsewhere. I said a minute ago, the provinces can legislate with respect to animal cruelty and all of them have. Nova Scotia's got its Animal Protection Act. Its main provision about causing unnecessary distress to animals is the same at core as that in the criminal code of Canada. In addition, like all 50 American states and the District of Columbia have got an animal cruelty provision and it's the same one. It's you shall not cause unnecessary cruelty to animals and has been interpreted in roughly the same way. On top of that, there's a range of other federal legislation. The Health of Animals Act deals with transportation of farmed animals. As I said, I'm going to go for the most part, the last ride, the one from the farm to the slaughterhouse. What does it say? It says you shall not transport animals in a way that causes unnecessary cruelty. I don't know why you had to have that when you got the criminal code already, but it just replicates that idea. There's a federal statute called the Meat Inspection Act that deals with the methods of slaughter of animals. What does it say? You shall not slaughter animals in a way so as to cause unnecessary cruelty. It's the same provision that appears roughly throughout the Western world and, as I say, federally in the criminal code of Canada and in the provinces. That's what all the criminal code does. Very briefly, it also says to person to own animals or who have custody of them that they have to provide the necessities of life. So if you're an actual owner of animals, you've got to provide food and water and veterinary care and a range of things or if you're a custodian and the provincial ones do that as well. So that's on top of the unnecessary cruelty provision. One thing that I often found interesting about, this is a bit of a sidelight, to the unnecessary cruelty provision is one big sort of litigation success of the animal movement. There's a case in England called the MacLible case where a bunch of picketers called Greenpeace London, which is really part of the larger Greenpeace organization, picketed McDonald's and said McDonald's is causing cruelty to animals because of its relationship with its suppliers. It facilitates the raising of chickens and cows in a way that permits the cruel treatment of them. And McDonald's brought a defamation action against those people in the courts of England, saying, no, we don't, you're defaming us. And there's a defense to a defamation action known as truth. Even if you're saying something bad about someone, if it's true, it's not defamation. And the claim that the picketers were making in that case was basically McDonald's is causing unnecessary cruelty, or at least facilitating it to cows and chickens. And the picketers relied on the defense of truth. They said, we think they are causing unnecessary cruelty. And the matter went to the jury. And you might've thought, given the meaning that I've tried to explain about unnecessary cruelty, as it's understood as an offense in the criminal code, that McDonald's would win. But the jury said, when it was told the facts of how animals were raised on the farm and the chickens and so on, said, actually, we think they are. That is, the jury wasn't bound by the meaning given by the court because the charge the judge gives to the jury in a libel cases, just understand the words in their ordinary meaning. In the ordinary meaning jury, do you think the chickens that are being killed for McDonald's are suffering unnecessary cruelty? And the jury said, yeah, we think they are. We're not going to find for the plaintiff in that case. So I talked a little bit about that provision. It's not the only sort of provision in the law with respect to animals. The law is full of a number of what I would call prescriptive standards for the use of animals. And let me just give you a few examples. There's a federal statute that deals with transportation of farmed animals. It's got the provision in it that says when you're transporting farmed animals, you shall not do so in a way that causes unnecessary cruelty. In fact, it's got about five of them. You shall not load them in a way that causes unnecessary cruelty. Shall not unload them in a way that causes unnecessary cruelty. But it's also got some other standards. For instance, it says when chickens are being driven in a truck, the journey can't be longer than 36 hours. And it's an offense to drive chicken, you know, the ride from the farm to the chicken slaughterhouse has to be under 36 hours. And it's an offense to make it longer. And that would be an offense regardless of whether you prove unnecessary cruelty or not. And there are a considerable number of provisions like that. There are provisions in a federal statute called the Meat Inspection Act, dealing with the slaughter of farmed animals that says they have to suffer instantaneous loss of consciousness. You can't kill them in a slow fashion and actually specifies they have to either be shot in the head with a bullet or a captain bolt or electrocuted. And it sets out standards. It sets out a range of other standards. It says when you're unloading them and you got an electric cattle prod, you can't use it on the face or the genital region, which I guess means you can use it elsewhere. So it's got specific standards and there are a lot of those. We've got them in some provincial statutes and it's not just for farmed animals. In our provincial statutes dealing with hunting and trapping, you can't use leg hold traps for most types of trapping. That is traps that don't, in most cases, instantaneously or quickly kill the animal, but just allow it to sort of wait for a day or two till you come and collect them. So there are a range of statutes out there that in addition to the unnecessary cruelty one, regulate the ways we can treat animals. And I mentioned this because a matter that was much in the news lately with respect to the amendments brought into the Provincial Animal Protection Act in the spring, dealt with changes to, or possible changes to how long dogs could be tethered inside or outside, without a break. Can you just leave a dog tethered in the same small area or caged in a small area? And the statute was amended to permit some new regulations on it. No, we haven't actually got the regulations yet, but people will be working those out. And I mentioned that because I know some people said in connection with that change, well, why do you need that? We've already got a provision under the Federal Criminal Code that says you can't cause unnecessary cruelty to your dog. And under the Provincial Criminal Code, which roughly says the same thing, why do you need a specific provision? I guess the answer is it's sometimes hard to prove the general offense, and if you've got a hard provision that says a dog can't be tethered for more than six hours in a row, and then you can measure it, you can more easily bring the prosecution. And I think there is room for that, and it's a good idea to bring them into provincial statutes. As I say, we've got them in farm statutes, let us say the statute dealing with transportation of farmed animals, both says you can't cause unnecessary cruelty, and says chickens no more than 36 hours. As an observation, I don't think Canada's standards are particularly world leaders, the equivalent standard in the European Union for maximum lengths of time, you can transport a truckload of chickens, it's 12 hours, Canada's not great, but it's in it, but it's better than some others. Let me move on to two specific areas that are a little bit different than what I've talked about so far. The first of those is regulation of experimentation in Canada, biomedical experimentation. And the second of those is treatment of animals in international trade, in particular the, I'm talking about the dispute with the European Union's seal ban, ban on Canadian seal products. So first up, biomedical experimentation. It's said, I don't know whether it's true, that Canada's the only modern Western country that doesn't have a specific law focused on regulation of experimentation on animals, on treatment of animals in their use in medical things which is done at this university, in the hospitals or in industry for industrial products. Now we do have the criminal code, remember I said with the criminal codes provision on unnecessary cruelty that it applies to everything, including experimentation. Anybody want to guess how many prosecutions have been brought under the criminal code against lab workers or doctors or scientists with respect to cruel treatment of the mice and the, none, right? It hasn't been used. No, maybe, and I'm not trying to be facetious, maybe none of them ever cruelly treat the mice and other animals that are used. But it's still the case that other countries that have a general anti-cruelty provision also have some specific regulations on treatment of animals and experimentation and Canada doesn't. We stand out as not having one. That makes us look behind the times. I'm not sure that we are. Let me explain what we do have. And in terms of just what we're worried about, the number of animals used in experimentation in Canada today, mostly mice, rats, some fish, is about three million, which is small compared with agriculture, three million, we kill three million chickens about every two days. So it's small in terms of numbers, but it's still three million beings that are being used. And by used we mean at the end of the day, killed in the context of experimentation and teaching, a much smaller number for use of teaching in university courses, also some there, including at this institution. We don't have a statute dealing with that, but I think we've got a pretty good system. The federal government said back about 1964, we think we should have a statute. We think we need special regulation in this area. And the animal using groups, the universities, the hospitals and so on, said back off, hold off for a bit, we'll regulate ourselves. We'll form a group, and they did, it's a group called the Canadian Council on Animal Care, the CCAC. When you see a title like Canadian Council on Animal Care, it sounds like it's a group that cares a lot about animals, but it's the lobby group for the people who use them in experimentation, why they didn't use the word experimentation somewhere in the title, I don't know, but it's all about experimentation. They said, let us regulate ourselves and stay off our backs. And the federal government bought it, and that has been the situation ever since. It's what in the regulatory literature is called sort of forced regulation. It's like, if you don't do a good job at it, we will step in and pass a statute. So you've got to make sure you're having some particularly high standards, but so far the standards have been high enough so that neither the federal government nor the provinces have stepped in with a specific statute. So the CCAC regulates use of animals and experimentation here and in the local hospitals, and I think they do a not bad job. Their test isn't unnecessary suffering. It's something called the three Rs. And those are reduce, maybe not even the right order, reduce, replace, and refine. So basically how it works at this institution, if you want to at Dalhousie do an experiment, kill 100 mice to try to find a cure for cancer, you've got to go before a committee and show number one that animals are necessary that you can't investigate your hypothesis without killing the mice. Number two, that you're using the minimum number necessary and there's scrutiny for that. You see, I need to kill a thousand mice to prove my hypothesis that committee might say, no, you can actually prove it with 600 mice and we're not authorizing you to use more. Replace means they will scrutinize you to see whether you can't replace animals entirely so that people say, I need mice to teach a class in dissection. We'll have to prove why some of the computer programs available for that activity are not good enough and sometimes they can. Sometimes they say, we really need to use real mice to do this. Refine means you have to show that you're minimizing suffering in your experimental design and it's a fairly rigorous process. Now, what I want to sort of point out in this process, you might be wondering, well, what if a given institution doesn't join in? What if they say, I just don't want to join the CCAC and be part of that. Basically, they can't because, although there's no criminal penalty for not doing so, there's a very effective hammer and it's this, if you are not in compliance with the CCAC's approach to experimentation on animals, you're not eligible for federal funding from the primary federal government funding sources, that is the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council or the Canadian Institutes for Health Research or any other, not just for that experimentation, but the whole institution is not. So if one experimenter at Dalhousie says, I don't want to go through this process, in theory, Dalhousie gets cut off from all the funding from those federal sources and if that hadn't, the lights in this room would go off and about, you couldn't run this place for two minutes without transfers or research funding from those federal government sources. So there's a pretty effective compliance mechanism. Now, it still means some animals have to go through some painful experiments and we can debate whether morally that's all right or not, but there is a fairly good test for ensuring that no more of them go through than necessary, that they're not suffering any more pain than necessary and by and large, I would say, if you had to be an experimental animal, you're a lot better off in the Dalhousie animal care facility than you are in a farm, you're in a bigger cage, you get better food, you get environmental enhancement, you get little toys to play with if you're a, so you're not so crowded, you get the proper diet and you get the least painful death possible, but you still die at the end, so it's not that great a deal, but for the period of time in which you're in the cage, you're better off in a Dalhousie cage than on a farm, the standards that the CCAC applies in terms of, and it's quite specific how big the cages have to be and what the diet has to be and I should say there's a sort of separate feature, I don't want to be praising the CCAC process, but there's a separate feature to it in addition to the vetting of individual experiments to see that they're medically necessary and with the minimum number of animals necessary to prove the hypothesis, the CCAC comes around and does tours of the facility and says things like, as it did on its last tour of Dalhousie, you need a new ventilation system to get more fresh air for the animals and when they say that, the university just does, it doesn't, you can't say no, because all the funding disappears, so there's a system, I don't overly praise it, but at least when I hear people say Canada doesn't have a statute focusing on medical experimentation and it makes it sound like we're some outlier that has no regulation at all of our experimentation, I think we've got something else. Now the final sort of negative comment or that you have to make is that hammer only works for companies that need federal funding. The universities do, the hospitals do, but what about a private company that just wants to do my biomedical research for pharmaceuticals or whatever, they may not depend on federal grants. Some of them belong anyway, some of them like to say on their websites that they're a member in good standing of the Canadian Council on Animal Care and that all the experiments that go on in their institution are subject to this fairly rigorous view, but some of them just don't care and what goes on at them, I don't know, it just could be hell on earth for the animals there. How many of those there are, I don't know. I tend to think they're not a lot largely because everybody says Canada doesn't do much research and development, or just a branched plant economy anyway, but to the extent that there is some and the companies doing it say we don't depend on grants from the federal government, there isn't much regulation of those and that's a problem but so far hasn't been enough of a problem to prompt legal change. The second sort of issue, and again, a little departure from what we've done so far that I want to talk about, is an interesting development in connection with the ban that the European Union instituted on seal products and the importation of seal products. There, Canada has challenged that under a tribunal of the World Trade Organization, the WTO, we will probably get a ruling on that before the end of the year, before Christmas and to my mind it will be one of the most important animal welfare related rulings that we'll have had in a long time. Well, there will be an appeal, whichever way it goes and the ruling of the appellate body when it comes which will finally settle things will be important and I want to take a minute to explain why. The WTO says that you can't erect barriers to the importation, the cross border importation of the products of other members of the WTO, the World Trade Organization that most trading nations want, almost everybody does. You can't erect barriers to it. So in theory you think the European Union can't say that Canada can't sell seal products there. It can decide for the European Union that its members can't engage in hunting and killing seals but it shouldn't be able to keep out Canada's. But there are some exceptions to that under the, under the, that, the document. One respects, one relates for instance to health. When the BSE crisis broke out how many years ago now in Canada, some Canadian cows tested positive for bovine spongiform cephalitis. The United Nations could ban the importation of Canadian beef and it could get away with that because there's an exception that says well you can ban the importation on grounds of health. The question related, the question that comes up in the SEAL connection is can you ban the importation on grounds of animal welfare? The European Union has wanted to say not only that its members can't hunt seals but that you're not allowed, Canada's not allowed to sell its seal products there. And it specifically said that's because we think the SEAL hunt is cruel. It didn't try to base it on any other exception about that the SEAL population was threatened environmentally or that there was anything unhealthy about it, it did it because they said and they think it's permitted under their, under the Article 22G or whatever it is that you could legitimately ban importation of products on animal welfare grounds. And I think that's important far beyond the SEALs dispute. Let me try to give an example with something that's far more important than SEALs in terms of dollar amounts of trade. Let's think about chickens for a second, chicken welfare. Canada says it's got regulations about the size that a chicken, when we're battery chickens, how small the cage can be. Chickens have to get under our laws 60 square inches. It's not very much, you know, less than the size of this paper but you can't be less than 60 square inches. And interestingly, the United States has got pretty much the same regulation. What if Canada wanted to say let's give chickens a break? Let's give them 72 square inches per chicken. A little more room to move around. Interestingly, I picked up, this is slightly tangential. I picked 72 because that's the amount that McDonald's requires for chickens now going to McDonald's. McDonald's has gotten into the animal welfare game and says, you know, if you're eating a chicken McNuggets at McDonald's, those chickens are raised in higher standards than the legal minimum. And they are. At least McDonald's says those are at standards and claims that it monitors that. So your chicken McNuggets, those chickens get 72 square inches. But what if Canada wanted to say all chickens should get that, a little more room? We could do that, no problem. But here would be the problem. We import a lot of chicken products from the United States in frozen meals, a range of things. Could Canada say we think chicken imported into Canada has to be raised in cages where the chickens get at least 72 square inches? Now you might say, why would Canada want to bother to do that? Isn't it enough that we worry about our own? But the problem is that most improvements in animal welfare cost a little bit of money. If Canadian chicken farmers had to provide cages with 72 square inches and they had to compete against American chicken farmers who could get away with 60, that would be an advantage for the Americans. So that if we unilaterally tried to increase the welfare of chickens by giving them 72 square inches, and we couldn't at the same time say that implies as well to any chickens that are imported to Canada, it would be rough for the Canadian chicken farmers. They'd lose a lot of business. So the question then arises, could we under the WTO get away with that? And that's exactly the same issue that's at stake in the SEAL ban. So the SEAL ban is a big test case. The SEAL industry and the industry is relatively small in dollar terms, not that many people involved, but the issue, the precedent that will be set by the World Trade Organization appellate body, I think in the EU chicken ban case, sets will decide in effect whether countries that want to pursue better animal welfare can do it not only by imposing higher standards on their own users and producers, but can do so on imports. And for some products that's not important, but for others I think it very much is. So big case coming down, I got a sense of which way they're gonna go. It's in a way, in my view, it's too bad. The Canadian government felt that it had to jump on board and support the SEAL industry on this one because I would like to see them supporting a view that says simply because of the other things down the road, it's legitimate under the World Trade Organization exceptions to impose import bans on welfare bases. But who knows, I'm not too much on what's going. Okay, I was, I think I would stop there, because I'd like to, I'm afraid the part of this evening I'm most looking forward to is some sort of discussion. So I sort of welcome questions or comments, but also I don't want to have just a series of dialogues of one after the other. I'm interested in any, either questions that you think will be of general interest or observations either on anything I've said or anything else broadly related to animal welfare in Canada. Yeah. My name is Sylasian, I'm from the Arctic Center in New York. So the last point that you raised is great interest, but I just wanted to be from this maybe asking, like this legal dispute between the EU and Canada is not more about more values and humans and animals. Like the argument that is used a lot on the Canadian side is about the revenues and the rights to subsidence of local populations and inwards in particular. The Europeans will use at least as much it seems to me the argument that this is to defend public morals, which is one of the exception of the WTO ban animal welfare as such because this is a little bit shaky in the WTO. So to what extent is this more of a human values than really meaning animal concerns these days? Well, you're right that the word public morals is the actual words used in the article 22. Gee, but I would have thought the public morals are the animal welfare concerns. What you said is that the preamble of the EU ban talked about the inherent necessary cruelty of the fishery as it was conducted. So I would have thought they're using that public morals exception as saying that it includes concern for animal welfare. I thought so maybe I don't get repressed to them. If I can do the points, okay. One of the argument that is used also by Canada is that Europe raises could be more of an issue but doesn't apply this internally to a coalition, for instance. And so this is really not a matter of animal welfare but it's just about what we as Europeans perceive as right or wrong. And so it is to some extent the Europeans distance themselves from animal welfare and put their values more into the district. What values are there other than animal welfare in this case? So it would be like to preserve the Europeans relation of consideration of which animals are work and about the intrinsic value of animals. I mean it's getting out of liberty a little bit. It's not about the intrinsic nature, it's about the value of animals. It's about the values of... Oh, I see that. I mean more broadly I would be interested in your observations or anyone's about why Europe has been, I think so far ahead of Canada and the United States on the animal welfare front. For instance, I mentioned the maximum journey length in the truck for chickens from the farm to the animal forest. 36 hours here and 12 in Europe. No, I might simply say they actually don't need more than 12 in Europe so close together. Nobody's 36 miles an hour from an animal farm but just generally if I think you're better off as a farm animal in Europe than North America, I'm not sure why we're at it. Because politzic value is better down in Europe. Maybe. I might be wrong here but could it also be related to the food standards? Aren't the food standards higher in Europe than they are here? What they can and cannot serve themselves? I would have thought there's a range of things, not just farmed animals but for instance, the European Union has effectively had experimentation on the great ages and climate. We don't belong to Canada but it's permitted so it's not just farming. The Europeans got better provision for treatment of pets. So I don't think it's limited to just the regulation of farmed animals. But I don't know why. I mean they were better on a bunch of things. But I think in terms of greenhouse gases and yield of compliance, I don't know if it's related or not, but they seem to be ahead of North America. I don't know why. I love that they come down to space. If you don't have to take an animal for 12 hours, then you don't need a regulation that goes beyond it. And then where everybody's also smaller and more densely populated areas, it would be more, let's say for example, you can take an animal boss in the UK. The practical reality of the situation is, you're happy. So everybody's a little bit closer together. There'd be more, everybody would be in a sense more used to it. So I'm wondering when they thought that the fact that we don't have a statute like other countries do might open us up to more external mutation by big corporations because we don't have any sort of regulations in place with them. But they might send their experiment in the labs here. I don't think so because I think, I mean, it would have to be that Lads came here and didn't want to be in compliance with the Canadian Council on Animal Care. I don't know. There certainly have been relocations of animal research facilities, notably from England to the United States because of partly greater regulation in England, but also I think concerns about terrorism and spending some fairly active animal direct action in England. I think sort of combination was true. So there certainly has been, was it coming from labs or made up with the right thing? It's just expressly said, we're packing up in Cambridge, we're going to New Jersey, where we can not be hassled so much about experimentation. And the United States is much lack of the calendar. The United States does have a federal statute unlike Canada. It's called the Animal Welfare Act. It doesn't apply to rats and mice. It applies to dogs and cats and horses. Most of the animals use them for rats and mice. So the U.S. is a better place to be than Canada. I just thought, but I don't know. It's hard to tell because I don't think anybody has identified anybody yet that I know of. There's a lot of pain in Canada because of what they could get away with here, but they didn't. I was interested when you were talking about the presence when you're restricting among generals of animals. And I can't remember exactly what the other example was. But how it was justified because it was necessary for a profit. Right. And how that would reflect our society's values of profit over morals, whatever that might be. And then there was the McDonald's case where when it was given to a jury where your peers versus the legal system made the decision, it was a different result. And so I know that in history, there's been situations where the society has been morally unjust. And so the legal system is supposed to be there to protect that or protect justice or what not. But what about when the justice system is a kind of board of justice? So that's not really a question, but it's a. Yeah. I mean, I know that the Canadian justice system is that far out of touch with what the Canadian public as a whole thinks is permissible or acceptable. And that means that I think we have to countenance some remarkably different treatment of animals based not on which one suffers more but which ones are cared about more. For instance, here in Nova Scotia, there's the new provision that's gonna provide presumably anti-tethering provisions for dogs. And you couldn't keep dogs in cages smaller than a certain size for a period of time. But you can keep mink whose arms are not suffer every bit as much as dogs from that confinement. And there are probably no regulations for those. Because I would say it's one of the few comfortable sectors of the agriculture industry. So you can justify the differential regulations bearing on confinement of mink vis-a-vis cats and dogs based on anything about their cognitive apparatus or its acceptability to pain or stress or anything. It's just the public cares more about cats and dogs and will make bigger stink about them than mink. And then the government would respond to that. And I know you were focusing on court decisions, but I would have thought most court decisions are probably fairly mainstream in this area. And there may be some areas for courts that are behind the general public, but I would have thought the response of the legal system, although I don't like it, isn't any worse than or actually reflects what the majority of the public think about it. I was taking into account the majority of the public doesn't want to think about the welfare of farm animals. Well, I was thinking in the case of the rodeos, somebody brought that forward. So it was making those important to a member of society, but the court case sided with profit as opposed to the morals. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know what to say. I mean, my thing of where we would get legal change is by changing, you know, education of small children or whatever and change social attitudes and the law will follow, because I don't see the law as being all that while they are in touch with the general public welfare. Most people care about it. Yeah, that's what it's worth to say. It's going to be alive. So they said their defense, they're little friends with other parks. Yeah. And the judge said in his ruling that he left him off. And he said that if they had tortured the animal that they would have done it in a different manner. I don't know what that would look like to him, but that was what happened at the age. See, I was in Toronto then and that's not how I remember it. They were convicted. I know a lot of people complained that they didn't get the sentence that they should have. That's not my recollection of that one. There certainly are cases where, and maybe this is the best example, where people think the courts are out in touch by not curing the books at someone. They gave them six months and it should have been five years. There are people, there's a group of case where people think the sentence is hanging over too much. In the case of such a medium to limit that have much higher level of their laws or stricter, what happened to make those laws change? Like was it the public or were there more court cases? Were there more people being charged? Like what brought it to that? I don't know enough. I don't know of any big court case victories. It was, it's not all actions by the European Parliament because in many cases individual countries were members of the EU had acted unilaterally on their own within their countries. First, it's not all just a gang of Brussels during it. It was England, Denmark, some other countries taking a leave, but what there was about the political culture of those countries that caused them to be more open to that change, I don't know. It seemed to be public. Why would we do that, why would we do that? Why would we do that? Why would we do that? There wasn't like any major events that happened in the event that these things changed. For instance, here's a, and I can't quote these exact studies, but they're fair because Europeans are more willing to pay extra for a variety of food items and rates in best cruel conditions. More willing to buy free run aids and pay more for them than Canadians are. It's a larger segment of their market. They support more rigorous labeling systems so they can vote with their dollars. And that's just a matter of saying, as individuals, they will make those choices. But why is it that people in England do that more than people in Halifax? I don't know, there was an answer there. No, it's not an answer, it's a question. I'd like to go back to the concept of ownership again. What I struggle with, what I'm interested in is that it seems to me that it comes to cruelty to animals on that main issue. That it's always tied to animals that in some way we have some sense of ownership or familiarity with. Factory-farmed, domesticated animals. And that's where the affinity comes and that's where the emphasis goes on the notion of cruelty quite often. Dogs, cats, chickens, cows, just like you said. And meanwhile we have an entire ecosystem with hundreds of different species. And the only regulatory framework we have for those animals is endangered species, which we know is a fraction of the pot, at least many, many other species. As capable of paying harm, et cetera, that are domesticated, couched parrots. So I guess my question is, are you aware of cases that demonstrates the cruelty that goes on and has only escalated in the last 300 years in terms of the loss of diversity in species in a variety of ways that animals are harmed? Wild animals are harmed. Are the cases that demonstrate that, or are all the cases always based on animals that we seem to take some ownership or affinity for because we're not, we have wild animals, so we don't have the same level of connection to them? So I'm wondering if, are the cases for this, this is my question? Good question. Going back to the general criminal code provision, as I said, it's overarching and it applies to wild animals as well, and there have been prosecutions for hunters who will catch an animal or torture an animal. They shoot it and they wound it and then somebody catches them and says, just torture it to death. And those people have been prosecuted successfully so that the criminal code certainly applies to wild animals. It's not limited to the dogs and cats that we own. But there are many of those, and that's not getting to the larger picture about, I guess it's more of a societal, philosophical question as to why can we only, not always, but why is it so much easier when we put our affinity for animals towards those we've been messing with. As opposed to, this is only my own experience, as opposed to the diversity of species we have that we don't have that affinity and it makes us a huge slice down the middle. And where the equality issue should be rounded out more. It's very, you know, I've had cats on a lot of them. It's very self-centered as individuals. It's extremely self-centered. What's mine and what I love and that becomes a focus. Whereas this, which I don't understand or not exposed to or don't see, you know, is if you look at our numbers, an ecological point of view, loss of various species, that's the crisis. That's one of the crisis. I think that is true. And I would argue too that it is cool and inhumane in the way that this also happens. I think that's right. And don't think I would add to it. I didn't talk about endangered species legislation, but we have it. I mean, it's part of an international commitment. It is almost the only area where the loss sometimes will make decisions that seem to be on animal welfare that negatively affect economic interest. Because I was suggesting with respect to the fact that farming provisions and the cruelty once it facilitates the fact that agriculture we don't act. But if you put something like the Vancouver Island environment, where there's only 30 left, on the list, you effectively have to say, you can't farm anywhere around it. You have to preserve their habitat. And if you've got farming rights, then just talk. And we actually do hurt economic interest, not for individual animals, but when there's only 30 left in the species. But then again, the problem is, it's blood part of the general land list, in terms of, you know, you have to be down to 30 left before we'll start doing anything. But it is an instance of saying we will engage an animal protection even to hurt the corporate interest. But just to repeat, we don't do it very well. I lost time, but I said first, I don't have the first, but it's okay. At the beginning of your talk, you mentioned that in the last four years, things might have kind of retrograded into the worst situation for animals. As I was saying, the economic context of intensified factory farming, as well as the explosion of animal farming. I'm wondering, as far as legally, are there negative trends going on? Is there ever narrower interpretation of unnecessary suffering? Is it the broadening of religious rights to trump animal welfare with respect to certainly religiously supported factory farming processes? Or are there any other trends that you could bring to our attention, legally, that are causing retrograde? Oh, sure. Good question. I'm certainly, you're right, what I meant was simply the growth of factory farming. We just eat more chickens than we did when I was young. And some more chickens are suffering. I'm not sure there's been the growth of experimentation. The numbers there, I said three million a year, that's been pretty steady for a long time because we are finding ways to replace and reduce and refine, I don't know how long it's been steady. But at least for 15 or 20 years or so, the numbers of two and a half, three million a year are about equal. There aren't many examples of the laws actually getting worse. There are a couple. A number of Canadian provinces have enacted right-to-hunt legislation that protects people on very old British Columbia, that protects people's right to hunt and says, to come back to this the most interesting, you can't interfere with hunters when they're hunting to try to dissuade them. I don't know how this would hold up under the charter, but if somebody's in a parking lot getting out their gun, it's illegal and come back to go up and say, you can go up and kill for a little deer. You can't try to talk hunters out of it. Now I think that's going too far, but it means more and more a lot of American states, because what animal rights people were doing in the states was going into the woods on the first day of hunting season and saying, deer run for your lives for a lot of hunters, but they were spoiling the hunt and that was rendered illegal. Now whether it's illegal to go, the Quebec statue goes a little further and says, you can't even try to talk them out of it. I doubt that that could stand up under the free rights, you know, freedom of speech under the charter, but Canadian provinces have been making moves to enshrine the right to hunt. Canadian provinces haven't done this yet, but a number of American states recently have criminalized the activity of sneaking into factory farms and taking a discreet sort of clandestine video camera of that and to show the actual conditions and sometimes people get hired on to be a chicken carton knowing that they won't do that. That has been recently rendered criminal in a number, because they can't even show the picture of that. The United States has passed legislation dealing with animal terrorism that goes beyond, I think, criminalizing terrorism, but people who try to sort of lay down in front of the trucks that are bringing the chickens to the chicken factory by way of some protest has been criminalized beyond the mere sort of trespass as being animal related. There's an anti-animal terrorism act in the United States. Canada hasn't done that yet, but it's interesting our Bill C-36 that kind of passed very quickly in the wake of September 11th, 2001, that then became part of our criminal code legislation, lists and has been, and Ceasus works at it, so-called activist agencies in relation to political ends and includes animal, stop, no, why do you do it? It just augments crimes that are already under the criminal code, so if you engage in what would otherwise be a theft or a kidnapping, but you're doing it for animal rights purposes, you can do more time than you would if you're just doing regular kidnapping, I don't know. It's interesting to look at Ceasus' website. They list animal terrorists as right behind, but one of them was the great threat. I don't think anyone in Canada's, apparently people who are animal experimenters have had retarget slashed and threats have been made. I don't think anybody in Canada's been hurtful to have been in the state, so they have been focusing on combatting the white things in order to react, and sort of rhyming on little things like that, that are out there, that you might say is, it's not just like making it worse for animals, but it's digging in your fields against the force of the change in an interesting way, yeah. Can I ask you just a little by something? When you started your lecture, you mentioned that you were talking about mammals, and you said primarily you were focusing on mammals as being capable of reasons, so I'm sorry, and when you said that, you said you weren't sure about the birds, but you reference chickens quite a bit, so my question is, chickens are, that's a big one, that's a big one for pita, that's a big one for a lot of people, for vegetarians, and chickens are all crammed together, they're technically, it's a huge one, so is it the case, I wanna know where you are on the birds, because if chickens are, I think you know what I'm asking, are you suggesting that chickens do have this sense of reason, but other birds do not, or where are you in that, because I think the chickens think it's picked up, you know, it's huge, it's absolutely huge, whereas microphorosal birds, which are diminishing in horrendous numbers, we're not even touching, I'm not saying in the lectures, but in general, we're not even touching, so where are we on the birds, in terms of their, their, their percentage, percentage they are, or is this issue worth, right, I don't know if you're asking about the science of the law's treatment, I mean I think, I don't know what birds, reasoning of the law's capacity to meet them, but I think they feel pain, and stress, and boredom, and that the law actually does recognize that they do, and the same reason it does for me, there's no question, there are, there are cruelty prosecutions in respect to chickens, just, just, yeah. I was wondering if the court coming laws on tethering and caging, and you, let's start with, will have an effect on puffing in the industry, which is very much for profit, but the trade unions are quite distanced by what they have in their country? Yeah. I'm not sure I caught all of that, I mean, a number of provinces focus particularly on puppy mills, Ontario's got a specific provision, and one of the amendments to Nova Scotia's Animal Protection Act that came into force in April was to require for the sale of a dog, a doctor's approval, and that I think was focused on puppy mills under the understanding that animals that were raised in bad conditions wouldn't get the, sort of the veterinarian's approval, and that this was a way to crack down on puppy mills, sort of. But they're still in the present, I mean, especially in Quebec, for what I understand, I was just wondering if, because most of the dogs there are kept in cages, and you never see the outside if this law will have a perhaps inadvertent effect on this industry? I just don't know enough about this position. Do you have a sense that it's... I'm a culture group. I don't know. It's an ongoing thing. And the other thing related to this as well is sled dogs. Sled dogs are often tenured between their buns. It doesn't mean they're not what they'll be after, but I wondered if this law had any kind of big sections for working dogs. By this law, I'm not sure what you mean, the recent changes in Nova Scotia? Yes, that they had to be tenured before the ones that were coming up. Right. Sled dogs, for example, in the computer learnings, are usually tenured to engage inside the home town with other sled dogs? Well, it's my understanding that there was pressure by dog owners to have legislation dealing with tethering and caging and how long it could be done for dogs. And they couldn't settle on the details so that what was passed in the spring was the authority for the government to make regulations on that and that the government has been, it's probably all appalled now with the election, but the government did have a number of meetings with dog groups to try to get input as to what the appropriate regulations would be as to how long you should be able to tether. Was it size of cage? Was it nature of tether? Does it depend on the weather? And I gather there are, among some American states, some that do have provisions that directly address tethering, and we're looking at those. Yeah, but who knows, it may take a long time. Who knows if there's a different party in power, they may have no interest in following up on that level. Yeah. A lot of it became a big speculation of consciousness. A bunch of scientists came together and they stated that animals defined as being mammals and birds mostly are conscious. They have a sense of self. They have similar neurological functions of humans so they're capable feelings of the same as we do. In your opinion, can you see science ever having like a significant impact on our laws? See, what is happening? Science in general. And that's a big question. I don't think it's the primary driver of legal change in this area, not scientific consistency, I'm going to go back to my example of the differential treatment of the happily-acabinance between dogs and mainly. Enormous and doesn't seem to be justified by what we'd understand about their mental apparatus. So I don't see science as a consistency as being a principal driver here, so much as humans attachment to some animals more than others. We don't care much about rats, but we like cats and dogs. But there's got to be some other, for instance, in setting regulations about journey length and cave size and how much gentilation there has to be in a truck that's transporting animals, a lot of attention is paid to animal welfare science so that there are some areas where there's an enormous focus on the latest research and then other areas where science doesn't seem to mention the position in the driver's seat at all. Is there still a coyote calling those? A what? A coyote call? Yeah, I'm just saying so, yeah? What is that about? Or like what is it about? The problems, there's probably people who can speak to this more accurately than I have, but the problem is allowing at some point coyotes in certain areas to be hunted and people rewarded so much for coyotes or getting them, yeah. 2,000 coyotes? Yeah. The province gives money to people. What is it, $25 for? $35. $35? My parents have been married both in May or this four or five of them killed there in the last, probably 10, eight. People know how long that's been around. You're sitting over here. You know, so you mentioned that one way for animals to be protected is by being considered property. Yeah. And I was just wondering, because it seems as problematic to me and I'm wondering if you think that it's a good approach to considering animals and the way I mentioned my progress on the animal welfare movements? Right. Before I start, I've seen people leaving and I think we should probably kind of end it in five minutes or so. The property question isn't interesting one. It can work out very well for animals who are the property of owners who care for them a lot and it can serve as protection for them. You know, I've got a cat. I guess I own that cat. If somebody else starts harming it, my position as owner is going to be very helpful to that. I can exclude them and say, you know, get off, go do that. I can bring action against them. So if an animal has an owner that cares a lot, it's not a bad deal. If it's got an owner that is a little cruel or whatever it is. Sorry, what if a brindy in Francesco's ear or a brindy's been in a cage for five years? And, you know. No, but if I can carry with the bigger picture, that it's the ownership that farmers have of the animals they farm that allows them to kill them. It's just as simple. If I own property, I can destroy it. If I go home and don't like a particular vase, it's in my house, I can smash it and put it in the garbage. And I can abandon it. Put it out in the city can take interest in it. And I can do that to my cat. If I get tired of being a cat owner, I can go home tonight and kill it, just as an incident of being the owner. I can't do it in a cruel fashion, but it doesn't matter that there's somebody else in my life, my cat, who's really nice, who says, I'll take it. I say, no, I'd rather just kill it myself. I'm entitled to, and that's what entitles the slaughterhouse once it buys the animals to kill it, because owners of property can destroy their property. And they can also treat it cruelly, but we can interfere with ownership, which is what the criminals call provision. There's lots of ways we can interfere with ownership. If somebody owns a house that's got a heritage designation in Halifax and they can't do them all over paper, so we interfere in lots of ways with what would otherwise be the sort of complete freedom of the owner to deal with their property in the way they want. But it's always sort of an uphill battle to deal, to limit ownership. I said it's a sort of a starting point. Animals are our own property. It's not just a note scope. They've always been that way. I searched when I'm teaching animals a law for sort of the oldest case that shows this. Let's go back to 1382 and find a case that says animals are property, which you can't. It's just always thought that and nobody thought it could ever be any other way. And as I understand it, that's the way it is in Roman law. And everything animals are just owned or capable of being owned. And nobody's got another model. It would be interesting to know what other models that could be. People are trying to composing them. It's interesting, the city of Windsor had a very pro-animal city council. And it changed all of its civic bylaws to substitute the word guardian for owner. It didn't actually change anything. It simply said the guardians of a dog has to have a dog license. Cross out owner and substitute guardian. Now, it didn't change anything. The people who were in Windsor are called guardians of dogs. They can steal everything that they own again. They can buy them several things, whatever. But it was a bit like we often laugh at these things. But when the word miss came in, let's stop calling women either Mrs. or Miss. Mrs. or Miss, let's have a new word. And there is, I think, a capacity for changing language to change thought. But it's a slow and uneven process. Maybe we start calling guardians or whatever, or they're warned to change this thing. But that's pretty quick. One last question, or comment? Yeah? Which one do you think the seal meant to be a dog? You said you have an idea of where a dog is. The EU one? Yeah. I think, because of a feature I didn't point out, that the EU said in its provision that the ban doesn't apply to things that are harvested to seals that are killed in traditional hunts. And they did that partly. It may kind of look easier, at least, if we could import into the EU seals that are killed by the internet. But they did it also because the Greenlanders, who are part of Denmark, qualified for that, too. And they still kill seals in the traditional fashion. And I wonder whether the WTO body will say, well, you care so much about seal welfare, or you say you do. Yet you make this exception for traditional people. You're inconsistent, because the claim will be, you're doing it mostly for just basically the only seals that are harvested anywhere in the EU. There isn't a non-traditional hunt, but there are traditional Greenlanders killing seals in Greenland and selling them in. And I think the body might say, that's a little fishy. And they might say to the EU, if you want to go back to the drawing board and have an absolute ban on seal products and stop the Greenlanders from doing it, we might let you get away with it. I'm not an international trade lawyer. OK, thanks, guys.