 OK, well, 6 o'clock. Delighted to see so many people here for a talk on a matter that I hope you'll find to be of public interest at animals and the law. And I say that early on in case anyone sitting here has actually showed up for the law and literature moot, which is next door in room 105. Now would be the time when the room doesn't empty when I say that. That's me. I need no introduction. Actually, I do, but the dean who was going to give them is out of town. So I'll just have to say that I teach here at the law school, and I guess that'll do. I suppose I should say I teach, among other things, a course in animals and the law. And one of the exciting things and great things about teaching that course is the great variety of opinion and attitude and background that the students who register in that course take. I get students who are sort of strict vegans and won't eat honey because we steal it from the bees. And I get other students there who have clubbed seals and whose family clubbed seals. And I think that just great and are there to make sure that point gets across. And as a teaching experience, that's wonderful. I like to group hug as much as the next person, but as a pedagogical experience, a variety of opinion and very strongly held opinions is just a wonderful thing to have in the classroom. I've been very fortunate in my teaching of the course so far that although people show up with some very diverse opinions about the subjects that we covered in that course, they've always been able to express those very respectfully, no matter how deeply held they are. And I say that because my sense is there may be a comparable range of opinions on this subject held by people in this room. And I do want to find some time, maybe in about 45 minutes or an hour where we can have some discussion. And I hope in that discussion I'll benefit from the continued good luck of respectful exchange of deeply held views. I should probably start by trying to define a little more tightly the area of what I hope to speak about tonight because animals and the law, if we just phrase it that way, is a pretty big topic. And again, if I can illustrate that by reference to the sort of essays that the students have done in the course that I teach, because students are allowed to pick through own essay topics as long as it's got animals and the law in it, I've had students do big historical essays, that is essays on Trials of Animals in Medieval France, on the history of the offense of bestiality as it's developed over the last 500 years on an interesting Nova Scotia statute dealing with animals here in Halifax back in 1823. So big historical approach. I've had students who've gone pretty broad geographically, done their essays and their research on the Japanese war on whales in the Southern Ocean, on bear farming in China, on conflicts between elephants and farmers in Sri Lanka. So big scope. I won't be doing any of that tonight. I'm not gonna do the history at all except perhaps there's some very quick illusions. I'm gonna focus on the present. I'm not gonna go international and attempt to say anything about the law anywhere other than Canada except again very briefly for comparative purposes. So we've nailed it so far to the present and to this country, but even then, if I can go back to the sorts of things my students have thought it was worthwhile to research, they've been pretty broad in this country. They've included essays on conflicts between grizzly bears and sort of human habitation in BC. The rather deficient animal laws in the Yukon territory on problems with ducks landing and the tailing ponds for syncrude in Alberta with farming of pregnant mares in Alberta. In Ontario people have focused on their recent legislation banning pit bulls and then someone did one on New Brunswick where they don't care a bit about pit bulls but have a bill against Rottweilers. Go figure that out. I've had essays on foie gras farming in Quebec and so on, so large scope of sort of geography within this country and just orientation towards different types of concerns dealing with animals including things like animals and intellectual property legislation, tenure patent, the Harvard, miles and that sort of thing. So it's pretty broad. Again, I should try to narrow then what I hope principally to address today which is to focus mainly on issues of animal suffering, of the mistreatment of animals and the way that the law tries to address that. So I'm not so concerned about animal issues that don't bear or at least don't bear primarily on the suffering of animals. So it narrows that I think to a certain concern. I should say ultimately though I am interested principally in the law not the moral approach to this issue. I'm interested in the law and more generally what constitutes justice towards animals in Canada today. I might also say a word about which animals. So the topic again of the lecture is animals and the law and there's lots of animals from the single-celled well ones on up. Which ones are we concerned with? When I teach my course in animals in the law the first reading that I give to the students deals with cruelty to lobsters partly because I want to make sure that the students registered in the course that it's not just a course about cats and dogs and horses that we want to think sort of more broadly about what animals are covered. It's very interesting. You could do a whole talk I think on definitions of animals in the law. If I looked at some of the statutes that are out there for instance Nova Scotia's new animal cruelty protection act has got a definition of animals and it says animals are every non-human vertebrate. It's very important apparently to the Nova Scotia legislature to have a backbone and if you don't they don't care about you so that for instance there cannot be a prosecution for cruelty to lobsters in Nova Scotia because it's not important to have a backbone at least under that statute and there are other statutes that use that definition. There are statutes that use definitions or any animal is a non-human that can feel pain. Which is interesting because there's I think considerable empirical doubt about whether certain animals feel pain or not so it's a rather vague definition. And as I say I think we could talk a lot about statutory definitions. Just do the whole talk on why does this statute define animals one way and another statute define it. Another generally I don't wanna narrow things too much. I don't really care much about cockroaches. So I won't talk a lot about them although if people wanna get back to cockroach issues in the question period that's fine. Broadly speaking more generally the law has been concerned mainly with mammals to a certain extent with birds. I'm gonna talk in a few minutes about the criminal code provision for cruelty to animals and it doesn't have a definition. So in theory under the criminal code of animals, criminal code of Canada, there could be a prosecution for cruelty to any animal. In fact, when you look at what's brought there's never been one brought with respect to amphibians or fish. There's actually one reptile case but it's sort of a weird one that doesn't really count. The law is mainly concerned with mammals and sometimes with birds particularly chickens in the context of agriculture. So as I say, I'm not too concerned to narrow my concern here apart from fact that I'm not much concerned with insects and neither has the law being but things are open on that score. So where to start? Well, I'm a real Canadian so I think you just have to start with the constitution namely are animals a federal or a provincial concern? That's where you start with law anywhere in Canada with the constitution. Who's got the authority to deal with animals? Well, an interesting feature about our constitution it doesn't have the word animal in it neither in the original 1867 one that sets up the structure of the country and divides legislative authority doesn't mention the word animals at all neither does the Charter of Rights in 1982 that doesn't make Canada particularly special but there are constitutions of countries around the world that do Germany mentions animals in its constitution as of amendment of about nine years ago Switzerland did the same. There are countries that think that in their fundamental law that sets up the country and talks about what the polity is all about that there might be room there for mentioning animals too that it's that fundamental. The German provision just very briefly is this that the German constitution has for a long period had a provision that says the government shall treat humans with dignity. Pretty vague doesn't say a lot in the year 2001, they added a phrase my German is not much to that and the animal, the government shall treat humans and animals with dignity is in their constitution. Now I don't know that that changes much they still farm and eat and experiment on animals but I guess they're required to do so in a way that preserves animals dignity. It's not quite clear how that caches out and I think it hasn't made a big change yet but I think it's a nice thing that it's in the constitution. Ours has nothing as I say about animals but it does indirectly. If you go back to our constitution of 1867 it says things about who's got authority over fisheries. The constitution talks about who's got authority over agriculture but it talks more importantly about who's got authority over property so it deals with animals indirectly and in a way somewhat disturbingly the animals in our constitution are already commodities. There's nothing in our constitution that says anything about fish. There's something that says something about the fisheries that in our fundamental law that sets up the Canadian polity animals are there but they're pre commodified as falling under agriculture, falling under fishery or and I think this is the most central provision, property. They fall under property because that's the way the common law has always treated animals. It's done show in the law of England for centuries and there's no definition, no sort of deviation from that. So the provinces have got constitutional authority over property that is in the province and that means animals, animals are property or at least they have the capacity to become property. There are some animals out there that aren't yet owned by anyone but if you catch them or kill them and bring them home they become property. So the animals that aren't property at least are capable of being made property by appropriate action. So there are provisions in the constitution that pretty much have to be that give either the federal or the provincial government authority to deal indirectly with animals because animals fall under classification and I don't wanna go into that in great detail. It's split for instance with agriculture both the feds and the provinces have got authority over agriculture. It's a split jurisdiction. Fisheries is mostly feds on the offshore but the provinces can do some inland fisheries. There's a range of ways in which animals can fall under either federal or provincial legislation under a constitution and I may get back to some details on that but I think the big picture I can leave it there for the moment. I wanted as well to speak in that connection with where animals fit more in the political structure or do they fit at all in the political structure? I know this is a talk about the law but I was telling our students that the borderline between law and politics is a shifting and vague one so we get to talk about politics here too and in particular I'm thinking about the question of sort of who speaks for animals in the governments either federally or provincially. There isn't anyone up there in Ottawa that has I think the mission or even as a major part of their mission the right to speak or think or represent animals at the federal cabinet table. There's a minister of the environment at that table but they're not principally focused on animals. I was actually at a talk from a while back from someone from the federal department of agriculture who specifically said animals suffering and animal care is not part of our mission. They have a lot to do with animals at the federal department of agriculture but to the extent anyone is concerned with bad treatment or suffering of animals it's not the department of agriculture they're concerned with farming and agriculture and the health of that so to the extent you think that it might come under agriculture there would be something. Ultimately I think the only people at least in Ottawa who speak much for animals is the federal department of justice and they've also got a lot of other things to concern with but they're the ones who consider the revision to the animal cruelty provisions in the criminal code. And at one level I quite like that I think it's important to think about how we treat animals as a fundamental issue of justice and I think that's an important federal ministry and to the extent they are the only place pretty well to go if you've got concerns about animal treatment it's nice that it's under justice. On the other hand if you actually try to find any individual lawyer up there who's got sort of the animals portfolio I haven't been able to find them yet it's something that they get concerned with only interstitially and not very often. I wanna move now to what I think is the central way in which the law speaks to animal suffering in Canada and that's the provisions the criminal or inquisit criminal provisions that permit persons who inflict suffering on animals to be prosecuted if they commit a crime and the print the main one there is found in the criminal code of Canada and I wanna spend a little bit of time on it. There's a provision in the criminal code of Canada it was enacted fairly early in our in the country's history. We were found in 1867 it was added to the criminal law of Canada about three years later. We copied very largely a provision that had come into the criminal law of England in the 1820s and it's been part of our criminal law ever since as I say it's traced to an English law that's less than 200 years old. So it's a first observation. There's not a long history of caring about animal suffering in Anglo-Canadian law it really dates to the 1820s and we can talk a little bit more about the history of that in question period if anyone is interested. But it came into Canadian criminal law very shortly after the founding of the country. It hasn't been much changed for a long time. The provision that we find in the criminal code and I'll try to deal with it in a little detail in a second hasn't much changed since Queen Victoria's day. There's been a little bit of tweaking it's been broadened somewhat and it first came in like the English one it focused just on cattle and horses then it got broadened to include dogs and now it's just all animals so it originally focused rather narrowly and now it's open to all species but apart from that the general structure of the law hasn't much changed and here it is. I think I should read out to you that the main core that you'll find in section 446 of our criminal code. It says, person shall not willfully cause unnecessary pain, suffering or injury to an animal. You can't cause unnecessary pain, suffering or injury to an animal. That's a concept that's found in our criminal code. It's also found in all the provincial animal cruelty legislation because as I said things are split so that there's an animal cruelty provision in the criminal code of Canada but all the provinces including Nova Scotia have a specific statute that the feds get to do it because it's criminal. The provinces get to do it because animals are property so they can both legislate on this and obviously you can't get charged and convicted with violating both the criminal code and a provincial one. It's part of criminal law that they have to choose but there's a remarkable overlap and the provision in the provincial statutes is pretty much the same as the federal one. The core idea is you can't cause unnecessary pain or suffering to an animal. And I should go on to say beyond that concept just being found in the criminal code it's found in a lot of other statutes as well. There's a specific federal statute dealing with transportation of farmed animals from the farm to the slaughterhouse. And basically it says you've got to transport them in a way that doesn't cause unnecessary pain and suffering. There's another federal statute that deals with how animals have to be treated when they're at the slaughterhouse, how they're kept and how they are killed. And it says you shall not do that in a way that causes unnecessary pain and suffering. The concept of causing unnecessary pain and suffering is one that you see again and again in not only in our most general statute the criminal code applies to everything, right? It applies to farmers, applies to people who experiment on animals, applies to people who hunt, people who own pets. It's general and we've got a whole heap of specific statutes dealing with hunters and farmers in a range of things. But they all basically adopt the same core concept which is shall not cause unnecessary pain and suffering. Note, in this formulation, which is one of the things that jumps out to me, it's not a harm to an animal to bring about its death in a way that doesn't involve pain and suffering. So if you inflict on an animal a quick and painless death, just sneak up behind it and kill it in an instantaneous fashion, that's not a violation of the criminal code. But it doesn't seem that the sort of the life of animals is of value in the criminal law. We're just concerned about their suffering. Now, of course, if you shoot, the animal that you sneak up behind and shoot is your neighbor's dog, you're in trouble, but you're in trouble basically for the same reason that you would be in trouble if you wreck your neighbor's car. It's your neighbor's property, you can't harm people's property, and the criminal code deals with that simply by saying you can't wreck somebody else's property. That's what sort of covers painful death, but notion, sorry, that's what covers death to animals that you don't own, but it's not a harm to kill your own animal, right? I think people may not realize it, but those of you who have pets, you're entitled to go home and kill them in a way that doesn't cause pain and suffering. For the same reason, you can go home and smash up a chair that you don't like anymore. It's yours, you're entitled, just as part of owning property, you're entitled to destroy the property that you own. Now, we interfere in that, we regulate property in a lot of ways, so we regulate what you can do to the cats you own by saying you can kill them, but you can't do it in a way that causes unnecessary pain and suffering, so you can't go home and torture your cat to death, but you can kill it in a painless fashion. It's always interesting to me that the sort of death of animals, the curtailment of their life in the way that we so routinely do it in agriculture is not thought to be a harm to them. I think of the harms that could occur to me. A death, even if it was quick and painless, would be a pretty great one, and interestingly, I think it would also hurt members of my family. There's one here today, and I hope she'll later agree that it would be a harm to her if I was killed no matter how painlessly. That doesn't count for animals. That is, if they see their parents killed, I think we're starting to realize that animals do have emotional bonds, and that one animal might suffer if its friend or sibling or whatever were killed. That doesn't anywhere figure in to the law. So the key then is you can't cause them unnecessary suffering. I want to spend a few minutes on that concept. It's a pretty open one, and potentially you might think it provides a lot of protection for animals because why is it necessary to cause them any suffering at all? I mean, note out there in the wild, there's lots of suffering, but why do humans have to cause that? And if the law says we're not allowed to cause suffering to animals unless it's necessary, that might seem to give them a whole lot of protection. And in theory it might, but when you turn to what the courts have done, and have done consistently on that, I think, we'll see, I think you'll agree with me, it's not a whole bunch of protection. I think we have to talk about a few court cases, decisions from Canadian courts that illustrate this. I mean, a very simple one, a case was brought against a rodeo because the rodeo in, I gather this is sort of standard practice in rodeos, to get a horse to buck, they put a sort of a cinch, like a big belt across its genitals that is pulled very tight just before the horse is released to cause the horse pain, so it bucks more than otherwise would be done. And it's an intentional infliction of how much it hurts, some people, it's just uncomfortable, or some other people, it hurts a heck of a lot. I'll leave that to your imagination, but the prosecution that was brought with respect to that failed because the rodeo was able to, that's necessary pain, because if you don't do that, they don't buck. If they don't buck, people aren't gonna come to the rodeo. Rodeos are good, clean family fun, it's a legitimate thing to do to run a rodeo and compete with other sources of entertainment out there, so that the intentional infliction of that pain or even discomfort is necessary to running a rodeo. Let me just give you another example. A prosecution was brought against a slaughterhouse for killing pigs in a way that is going to detail, but it seems like a whole lot of pain. They sort of shackled them by a chain on one hind leg and swung the chain so that the pig's head hit the concrete wall and it seemed sort of, seemed relatively painful and that was a prosecution was brought there for causing unnecessary pain and suffering and again, it failed because the slaughterhouse is able to make this argument. One, it's legitimate to eat meat, people like to do it, you don't have to. They don't have to prove that it's necessary to eat meat, simply people like doing it, it's a legitimate industry. You have to, as a slaughterhouse, operate in an efficient fashion. Pork is in competition with tofu and a whole bunch of things. If we took the time to kill them in a less painful fashion, it would be more expensive and we wouldn't be able to compete and therefore we're just, the main argument is we're not doing it for sadistic purposes, we're doing it to make money and basically, I think the argument works this way. If you're causing injury to animals, to make money as opposed to, you just get your jollies out of it, then it's necessary pain and suffering and I think I've got to inflict a third example on you because it's a recent case and it, to my mind, illustrates a lot. In the raising of chickens for meat, chickens have been sort of bred in a way that they, the ones that are raised for meat as opposed to those that lay eggs grow very, very quickly, much more quickly than they would in the wild. They get to sort of slaughter weight in 39 or 40 weeks. They just, they're bred to be really, really fat and just to put on a lot of weight and so that's fine but then there's a problem of the chickens that are used to breed the so-called broiler chickens. Who's gonna lay the eggs for these chickens? Well, the problem is they get so fat in 39 weeks. That's when you take them off to market but they don't become sexually mature by that age. They don't become sexually mature till whatever, or 60 weeks. So you've got to have the same phenotype of chicken get to 60 weeks before it can start laying eggs so that you can keep producing them. Well, there's a problem. Because the chickens were bred in such a way that they put on so much weight, if you actually let them eat food, they don't get to be 60 weeks old because their legs break before they get, or they have heart attacks, right? That they just can't survive or at least a lot of them get broken legs or wings. So that the only way you can get them old enough to lay the eggs for the broiler chickens is to keep them perpetually hungry so that the breeders for broiler chickens never get a square meal their whole life. They have to be sort of underfed always because if you let them eat as much as they want, they get fat and their legs break. So a prosecution is brought again under the same notion. That's causing unnecessary suffering. You're not feeding them ever a regular diet. Again, the prosecution fails because the argument is that chicken is sure you can breed them so they didn't get fat so quick, but then we wouldn't be able to take them to market at 39 weeks, we'd have to wait till 80 weeks. That, you know, that's just not economically efficient. We'd lose out to the tofu manufacturers or whatever. We're just in it to make a profit. We're not doing it because we hate chicken, so it's necessary pain and suffering. So it's always sort of interesting to me that the definition or the contents that the courts give to that phrase is one that I think some people find surprising and you might wonder then, well, where does it ever result in a conviction? Well, if you get a couple of frat boys who just like torturing a cat to death, they can be prosecuted for causing unnecessary pain and suffering and you might then wonder, well, why can't they come to court and say, well, this is the only way I can get my jolly. They say nothing else makes me as happy as statistically torturing a cat, so why doesn't that argument work for me if the profit argument works? Well, the courts just say it's sadism is not a legitimate goal. Profit making is, competing in the food, supplying people with various products that they want are legitimate goals, but sadistic torturing of animals is not. So that's the main structure of the law and that's why to date there hasn't been, although people think that we've got provisions against animal cruelty and the criminal code, it doesn't interfere with the normal way in which agriculture or entertainment or anything is carried on as long as people are not, as long as people are pursuing a sort of profitable goal. There's a sort of an interesting adjunct to that. It's sort of been a bad news story so far, but there's one case that did succeed in illustrating and sort of making a claim for suffering. It's not a Canadian one, it's an English one, I think it would go the same in Canada and some people may know about this one. There's a bunch of protesters in London and England who were picketing outside McDonald's, handling a leaflet saying McDonald's is responsible for a lot of animal suffering in that they've got a lot of control over their suppliers, the people they buy the chickens and beef from and they don't require their suppliers to adhere to any particular standards and they sort of feed into the whole agricultural production system and so the people who are leafleting McDonald's think McDonald's causes cruelty and McDonald's in what's gotta be the least in retrospect, the stupidest move they ever made, sued those people for defamation, took them to court for saying we don't do that and surprisingly the defendants there didn't do what I think I would do and everybody in the room would do it, just cave in and say sorry, sorry, forget about it, we'll do it again, they actually went to court and defended on this ground. It's true that McDonald's causes cruelty to animals and you would think well how are they gonna succeed on that given the definition and the way the courts have treated the concept of unnecessary suffering so far? Well they won for this reason, under the law of defamation the law says that we should take words in their ordinary person in the street meaning, not this definition of what's unnecessary cruelty under the criminal code but what would the person in the street say? So the people actually took years and years to call the experts and say here's what it's like on the chicken farms McDonald's buys from, here's what it's like on the beef farms McDonald's buys from, what do you think? What do you, the court think as to whether that's cruelty or not and the court say yeah it is and McDonald's lost, they lost on the defense of truth because to my mind this is the core lesson from this case if you actually take what the law of defamation says we have to take meaning, words in their ordinary everyday meaning with the people walking around the street think amounts to cruelty. There is cruelty in the food reproduction system but not in the way that the courts give it under the criminal law. So that as I say is the sort of the main provision, the main sort of legal provision that's brought to bear on animal suffering. I'll just say a couple of things about how it's really brought to bear. I mentioned it's pretty much only brought to bear on mammals as I say the frat boys who torture cats so it's not brought to bear on the animal industry. Not brought to bear on treatment of fish or anything else. There's a curious provision or a sort of way that the criminal code is applied for the animal cruelty provisions unlike anything else in the criminal code investigation and prosecution is handed over to the societies for prevention and cruelty to animals. It's, we don't do that for other provisions. We've got the police who are charged with they got investigation, we've got sort of crown prosecutors who are dealing with that. For animals we've got basically higher a charity to do the enforcement for us and there's a long history around that but it results in a curious sort of skewing of the prosecution because how does the SPCA get its money? It gets very largely from charitable donations and it has to keep its name in the news and it's actually sometimes very effective when they do bring a prosecution. They're actually pretty good on the public relations front better than the police are about getting their prosecutions in the newspaper. They're very good at it because unlike the police they know their funding depends on it that they hope all of you when you die will leave something to the SPCA in their will so they can carry on the good work. It does among other things mean that they have to skew their investigations and enforcement to areas where they think the public will be sympathetic. They're basically a dog and pony show and cats too. There's not much in it for the SPCA to be worried about cruelty to chickens because it doesn't rack up that well in the donations front. So it's an odd sort of skew. It's got advantages but it's got some disadvantages too and again I might want to come back to that. Now I focused a lot on the provision for unnecessary cruelty. There are lots of other quite specific provisions in the law dealing with animals. That is I mentioned there's a federal statute dealing with transportation of animals from the farm to the slaughterhouse and it says that when you're transporting them they shall not cause unnecessary cruelty. And we talked about that. It also lays out lots of very nuts and bolts things about stalking density, about the angle that the ramps have, about how often you have to stop to water the horses, how much ventilation there has to be. There's a whole range of very specific provisions and I think no point and certainly no time to go into all of those there. I will make this sort of unsupported observation about them. Canada is not a world leader on those. If you compare the Canadian provisions just say on transport to animals with those in force in at least the European countries, how often the animals have to get a drink of water on the way from the farm to the slaughterhouse. We're not very good. And there's room for improvement. A particular difficulty Canada has is that we're very tied into the United States and it's very difficult for Canada to change its laws, particularly in the agriculture field if the United States doesn't. And here I want to sort of move to what I think is one of the most important, at least important to animal welfare, legal disputes that's coming down the pipe here and that's the Canadian challenge to the European seal ban or ban on importation of seal meat. The European Union started off with bans in the Netherlands and Belgium and Luxembourg but now it's EU broad has put a ban on importation of Canadian seal products and they've been quite specific that it's on animal welfare basis. Some people have complained about was the seal hunt likely to threaten the population of seals and differing opinions on that I've deferred to anybody in the room on that one but the Europeans didn't rest it on that on their ban that's recently come into effect. They said seals are sentient creatures and you can't kill them in a way that's acceptable. And they based it on animal welfare standards. Canada is challenging that under the World Trade Organization saying you can't do that. We've got free trade the WTO system allows some sort of barriers for instance if when Canada had a BSE outbreak the mad cow disease, United States and some other countries that were not importing Canadian beef until you get that cleared up. You can have bans if animal products going across borders threaten human life or threaten other animal life. It's not clear whether you can have one on grounds of animal welfare. If anybody wants to go into the details of the exceptions in article 20 of the general agreement on trade and tariffs it's a very much open question who's gonna win that one? And it will be very interesting to watch why I think it's so important for animals is this. What if say in the agricultural sphere Canada wanted to treat animals a little bit better than the United States does. I mean here's a specific regulation I said before Canada's got quite a part from the cruelty provisions. There's lots of specific provisions dealing with animals and one of them deals with how much space you have to give a chicken. That's being raised for laying eggs. The EU is actually phasing out cages for chickens. That's my point earlier about Europe being ahead of us. They haven't done so yet but it's coming into effect. Chickens gotta be able to walk around on the ground but that's more expensive, right? You can't jam as many of them into a room. The law in Canada is that you gotta give a chicken 60 square inches. Follow this piece of paper. It's not very much. What if we wanted to up it in Canada and say you gotta give a chicken 72 square inches to move around it? We could do that. But that would be a problem for Canadian chicken farmers because in the United States it's 60 square inches. And if you have to give a chicken more space, you can't jam as many of them in the same size building. It's more expensive. And chicken, at least chicken, frozen chicken products and everything go across international borders. Let's do other animal products. So could Canada say this? This is what I think is an issue in the seals case. Could Canada say, here in Canada you gotta give a chicken 60 square inches and moreover, if chicken products are coming into Canada, either live chickens or frozen ones or whatever, they have to be raised under those same conditions so that American farmers, if they wanted to sell their frozen chicken products into Canada would have to agree that they got their 72 square inches and would apply to eggs that came from those chickens and eggs that were in cookies. And it would be pretty broad provision. Could we say that? I don't know. That's what's at stake in the seal case. And to my mind, I really hope Canada loses that one because as a broad, not just Canada and the chicken example, the World Trade Organization rules are, whether we realize it or not, crucially important because if you can't, in imposing your welfare standards, if you can't impose them in terms of trade bans elsewhere, then you basically can't bring them in. Canada can't effectively tell its farmers that it's gotta give 72 square inches to a chicken because if they can't stop the US bringing in products from 60 square inches, they'll just undercut them. And you can't do that to Canadian farmers, ethically and certainly not politically. So I think the seal dispute that will go to the WTO panel and certainly to the WTO appeal panel, it won't be done anytime soon, is to my mind a crucial one because, and you've seen this phenomenon elsewhere, because of the way that we've in some sense given up our sovereignty to be a part of the World Trade Organization system. So a big case to watch there. I wanna say a couple more things, but the time's coming when you'll have your say in about 10 minutes, I think. I think, broadly speaking, I'd say the situation for animals in Canada is not improving, hasn't improved in my lifetime, the criminal code hasn't changed, the standards for the most part haven't changed. I think in fact, it's made surprise to people, it's actually getting worse for animals. Worse partly because agriculture on its own is getting worse, there's just more animals being raised in more industrialized conditions with legislation that hasn't responded to that. There's a bunch of other provisions, I'm gonna tell you about one that's very technical. Canada brought into force, it's been in force just 10 years now, something called the Agriculture and AgriFoods Administrative Monetary Penalties Act, and I know your eyes are glazing over just at the head of the statute, it doesn't bring into force any new provisions for animals. What the Agriculture and AgriFoods Administrative Monetary Penalties Act did is to say provisions in federal legislation dealing with animal welfare, apart from the criminal code, but the ones dealing in agriculture, the ones that regulate transportation of animals from the farm to the abattoir, should be dealt with no longer in the criminal courts, but by way of handing out tickets. Tickets that do not result in a criminal record, that don't result in, basically parking tickets, or like, it's like getting a speeding ticket if you show up with, and the kinds of penalties, just, I mean I was reading case the other day because I'm looking at transportation of animals, someone shows up at a slaughterhouse with, I think it was 3,000 dead chickens, they froze to death because they didn't insulate the truck, they had to pay the ticket, but it's $2,000, right? It's like it's 67 cents for every bird that froze to death. So basically we've taken things out of the criminal courts, the thinking behind that is that the cross the CFIA inspectors, the people from the Canada Food Inspection Agency, if they don't have to go to court and just sort of issue tickets, we'll issue them more readily. They won't, if you have to go to court, you might think, oh, let's forget it, that's too expensive, I'll let you off of the warning, but the thinking is, let's make the whole thing, not so much a matter of the criminal law with its big stigma and its prosecutions and its criminal record and its possibilities of actual incarceration, not that we ever actually do lock up people for animal cruelty, but let's downgrade the penalties to basically find so that we will, the theory is, the theory is, get much better compliance if we make it sort of less of a big deal to act that way so that the chickens die. Now, as I say, does that make for things getting better or not? I think it's hard to tell, it might work and maybe it's sort of an empirical question there. Let me speak about the areas where I think change has occurred. I think it's important to identify the areas in which, for lack of better word, progress has been made. One is with respect to species at risk, if animals are threatened with extinction, there are new Canadian laws, species at risk, legislation and Canadian laws dealing with trade in internationally endangered species that are quite promising. So if an animal is hunted and threatened to extinction, so there's only a couple thousand left in the world, we do start to take action not really on the basis of the welfare of individual animals, but on the basis of threatened species and there is some, at least improvement there, I know people who look at the legislation say it's actually very hard to get the government to put the species on the list, but they do put some on and so apart from individual animals, if you're a threatened species, there's been some progress, there has been some specific progress that has been due to international pressure. I'm thinking here of considerable limitations on leg hold traps in trapping, interestingly brought about by pressure from European countries who said, we think we're not gonna buy your stuff if you use the leg hold trap. The other provision that I mentioned almost in the same breath here is the law that came into effect a little more than 20 years ago now, banning hunting of white coat seals. Again, because of the European pressure that they thought it was particularly cruel that the very cute little white baby seals were clubbed to death, I mean we still hunt baby seals, but not the white coats. So my point in mentioning this is if you want to sort of look at the areas, apart from the species legislation, the areas where Canadian law has actually changed with respect to welfare of individual animals, the ones that you can point to, interestingly are as a result of international pressure and for the most part international trade pressure, not shaming, but actually, we're not gonna buy your products unless you stop using leg hold traps. Apart from that, it's rather discouraging. There was an attempt to update the criminal code provision, the one that I was talking about earlier that hasn't significantly changed since Queen Victoria's day. There were numerous bills that went to Parliament starting in the 90s and the year 2000. They were roundly opposed by the Conservative and Reform Party and by the agricultural lobby and the animal experimentation lobby and came to nothing. We haven't been able to alter the criminal code provisions in Canada at all. And if you actually take the time to read the House of Commons debates on that and the committee debates on that, they're thoroughly depressing in that they say that the whole move to update the criminal code was by well-funded terrorist international animal rights people with a hidden agenda for, and the word terrorist was used in one of the debates, which it wasn't, right? It was brought forth by the Canadian Humane Society, but there's just been an absolute dead-ended even, I think quite modestly updating the criminal code with one important exception that I think I should mention and the Harper government did do this. They did increase the penalties for, it's just part of the tough-on-crime agenda. You can get fined and go to jail for a bit longer than you used to be able to do, but the statute remains the same, the one that I was describing when I was talking about the rodeo case and the pig's daughter case and so on. The only people that get convicted under it, for the most part, are sort of sadists and everything. And we don't mind putting them in jail, but it didn't alter the criminal code provisions in a way that made it broader or permitted any change. It's getting depressing. I'd point to a couple of other sort of avenues for hope, if you want, it's not yet changed. One is in the United States. Through a method of legal change, we don't have available to us in Canada. A lot of American states have, as part of their elections, the possibility for citizen initiatives to put things on balance and vote to actually amend the state constitution. At the same time, they're electing their governors and so on. The biggest animal change, or sort of pro-animal legal changes that have happened in the United States have come about through that method. Most recently, California's Proposition 2 in its most recent election, a couple of the ones that happened the same night Obama got elected was outlying veal crates for chickens and, sorry, veal crates for cows and battery cages for chickens. Won't come into effect for a bunch of years, but when people actually get to vote, as opposed to the party members, they were responsive to donations from the agricultural lobby and so on, and people actually get to exercise some choice they actually vote for better animal welfare laws than the politicians give us. And it's not just California, Florida did the same, Arizona did the same, they're not necessarily jurisdictions to think of as particularly progressive. Problematically, maybe it's a good thing, we don't have those sort of citizens initiative. They're not part of the Canadian polity, so we don't have that root to us. The closest analogy I can think of in Canada is things that cities can do. Cities can be sort of the civic politics movement can I think be, you know, because it's not so tied into parties and it doesn't cost so much money to run for city council as it does to run for parliament. Cities can do weird things and you will get sort of pro-animal cities trying to bring in laws only in effect in their city that seem, for lack of a better word, progressive. Windsor was one for a while. Windsor did a couple of interesting things. The city of Windsor changed all its civic bylaws to take out the word owner of animal and replace it with guardian. Didn't actually change anything, but instead of sort of owners of dogs have to buy a license, guardians of dogs have to. Now it doesn't mean they're not owners, cities can't affect that. You can still buy and sell dogs and still kill them, but they changed the vocabulary, which is a nice move. They tried to go further in the city of Windsor and outlaw basically animal acts at circuses in Windsor so that if you showed up in the circus, you couldn't have the trained elephants and the lions leaping through the hoops and so on. They thought that was cruel and that struck me as good, but was found unconstitutional. Cities have got power to deal with animals and as you know, city in Halifax can say that you can't raise chickens here, but cities' power to deal with animals only really relates to nuisance. So I can't start a pig farm in my house in the south end because it annoys my neighbors, but the no cities in Canada have the power to deal with animal welfare. The courts won't let the mind of their interpretation of the municipal act. So the well, civic politics can, I think, like simply the cities can be sort of weird and sort of not controlled by regular political forces, have at least potentially the power to be progressive if you want, but it's somewhat limited constitutionally. The final area that I wanna talk about and then I am gonna shut up is an area of some promise that is consumers exercising by their pocket book, their power not to buy products that they think animal products or products that they think are produced by methods that involve animal cruelty and you think of the body shop that says everything in it is cruelty free and so on. I think there's actually some hope for that and it may make a difference, make differences as individuals. If I get back to my sort of you as lawyer, what the law does about this, the government in Canada has been very slow about enacting any sort of legislation which would assist us in doing that. And in fact, they've effectively said we're not going to do that. So to the extent we want to, when you go out and buy a stove or a fridge, there's a sort of an inner guide thing. So if you think you wanna buy one that does use a lot of electricity, there's a government system that can say this stove is efficient, this one's not. It gives you some information you can rely on. Wouldn't it be nice if the government provided a system that said this is how much animal cruelty went into such and such a product? Because there's a lot more, it's gonna be seen to be straying a bit far, but there's some laminated wood in this podium that I'm talking on. There's a fair chance that in the glue that holds the thing together, there's animal blood, right? And the chairs you're sitting on on the table. There's a lot of animal products out there that are all around us. It's very difficult not to be involved in that. Wouldn't it be nice if when you were buying this that the government compelled you to disclose what was in it? The way it compels food products to disclose, here's how much sodium and here's this and so on. If you could convince the government to put in force a mandatory labeling system that gave us information as consumers to make decisions that maybe influence producers, I think we'd have a really powerful tool. The difficulty that I see there is that the government hasn't responded to that. They've taken some steps in this area. There's a very effective new piece of legislation from the Department of Agriculture or regulation that says there's a specific meaning to the word organic. You can't advertise something as organic without such and such meaning and we will enforce that so that people can tell whether something's organic or not. They've pretty much refused to do anything along the same lines with respect to animal cruelty and it's very difficult through the sort of optional labeling systems that we have out there to do something. I appreciate that there are private groups that say here are our standards and you can buy our label and you can trust this label, it's cruelty free. I think for the most part we don't trust those. They're too ill-organized, not well inspected, not well enforced so for the most part I'm often reluctant to pay extra for a cruelty free product because I can't be guaranteed that it is. Basically when I teach the course and I've tried to squeeze it all into about an hour here, I say here's why the criminal law doesn't work, here's why consumer labeling doesn't work, here's why the constitution, nothing works but maybe some of you have got some suggestions to do so I'll sort of go for an hour and that's about right. I hope you'll have some, either some questions or comments. Yeah, gee, there's a bunch of, I mean I could just go down the list of improvements that were before the House of Commons and voted down. One was to change the word willfully to say willfully or carelessly because it's very difficult to prove in court that somebody willfully caused, it's one thing to say there was cruelty, did someone actually intend to cause the cruelty has been a way in which a lot of prosecutions have failed so if you said willfully or recklessly or carelessly caused suffering, I think you'd have a better standard there but I think more generally I'm not sure you have to change the criminal code, you have to change the meaning that courts give to what is necessary suffering because I think potentially that the provision that you've gotten in the criminal code is capable of very different interpretations than we've given it so far and I'm not suggesting that the interpretations that the courts have given are totally out of whack with the understanding that most of us would have so I did like to talk about the libel case that says well, hold on, maybe people in the street do have a different understanding of unnecessary cruelty but it's just a matter of maybe changing social attitudes so that courts can give a meaning to unnecessary cruelty that's a whole lot different than the one we've given it for the last 150 years. And I wouldn't want anyone to leave this room with the impression that we prioritize our response to gain through our success, that's not true. We certainly under my leadership in the last year we are very accountable to the needs of the animal and these problems and we do so as you imagine very limited resources, we get about $2,000 a year from the government and we can't get a million dollars if we work with them. I just want to make sure that I don't lose them. No my bigger thing is why doesn't the government hire the Department of Justice and the police to put them on the case? To do, yeah, you keep them, that's it. There's an interesting question I'd like to ask you if I can, a significant change in the Provincial Animal Cruelty Act that Nova Scotia and all the parties supported this a couple of years ago is to take from the FPCA the role of investigation and prosecution for farm animals and give it to the Department of Agriculture. And of course the upside is they know more about it. They're the people who got, that is the Department of Agriculture inspectors know more about farmed animals and on the other hand, in addition, they're on the farms. They go to the farms not just on the cruelty investigation but they're there for the health inspection so that they're more likely to be on people's farms making sure they're in compliance with provisions not to let hoof and mouth disease spread and that sort of stuff. On the other hand, pretty obviously, seeing the Department of Agriculture should be the ones that brings cruelty charges against the farmers, seems, I don't know. Fox Guard in the head house comes to mind, doesn't it? But they'll take orders from the minister. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the enforcement that we can provide. Yeah, yeah. Yes. I just feel compelled to respond to your characterization of the rodeo case. Rural Canadian Roe grew up around horses all my life and I just want to object to the thing that a fucking cinch is used around the tailing of a horse. It's placed around the planks, which optically it looks like it's the case but I would assert that it's not the case. It does cause discomfort but it's more of a train tool like they don't call or what have you. Indicates to the horse that it's time to buck. All right. That wasn't the evidence in that, I mean you can go upstairs and read the case. I'm just offering you another perspective. Maybe things have changed. I just wanted to make sure that it was stated. Sure. I've been in mad discussions and parts of me all the time so I just felt personally compelled. Yeah. Yeah. I think you're at some point while taking your comments. I'm in the Human and Social Human Services. Yeah. I teach Social Human Services actually and my main thing is the answer is the post-sumption of the Human Health Services. Yeah. We see in the Human Services all kinds of divisions. Gender, online gender, race, ethnicity, disability, disability, and so on. And we've seen how movements have made in throughout the decades, women, the feminism movement in the 60s, people of color, rights movement and so forth. And I just, I think what we see, we don't address the division in this effort and the welfare protection. What I see going on among activists and other interested people is that you kind of have to pick your camp. So you're interested in companion animals and it's more than that sometimes it's illegal because they're cute and how they would just help make a dog catch horses. Or you're interested in wildlife or you're interested in, you know, reducing the culture of food and farming. Yeah. And I think this is, I just, the note that I'd like to put out there is that it's, I think we need to be very careful not to separate ourselves in this way but respect all life of a human or other human as I recall. Yeah, I mean, I don't mean to sort of follow the comment on every question but I certainly agree with your opening statement of among the sort of the, again, sort of progressive movements that you associate with the 60s and 70s starting with civil rights around race, the women's movement, but also generally the consumer movement, the environment and then later moving to sexual orientation and so on. And that's when the animal rights thing got started too, 1975, particularly with Peter Singer's book. It's the conspicuous failure among those and it's, you know, we've got the charter and it addressed gender and race and all these other things. We've got, we didn't used to have a minister of the environment, we've got one. Now an environmental protection act. Animals have just fallen flat and maybe that's, again, just going back to the social movement. It hasn't attracted quite the breadth of interest. It's been convinced fewer people of its claims and maybe that's just a simple explanation for why it hasn't cashed out with legal change, that there've been human rights acts and consumer protection acts and all these things, I'm probably not right in lumping them together but considerable sort of progressive bits of legal change since the 70s from those organizations but animals nothing. And I didn't go on down the long list but a lot of, there's hunter protection legislation that gives greater protection to hunters than we had before. There's the listing of animal rights groups as a terrorist priority for CESIS. There's, you know, sort of a backlash, you know, a backlash before you actually make any gains. Someone, Switzerland did... Zurich. Zurich? Cantona Zurich. Cantona Zurich, there you have one. I heard and I haven't been able to follow up on this that in British Columbia, there was one crown prosecutor who was designated with that as a special, in the same way that we designated crown prosecutors as specialists in rape cases or something like that. Let's get people who know the law and they'll only take those. So let's assign a crown prosecutor just on the animal's case. Now it wasn't 100% of that but that all the animal's cases would be directed to one crown prosecutor so you would build up some expertise which sounded progressive. A move that you've seen elsewhere. Yeah. Either in fact, it was a great deal to kind of change the spawn and increasing torture in the animals and their food systems and whatnot. So in your own study, if you come to some idea, because I'm curious why, what is it about the European nation, Europeans, I mean, often to great diversity around the European nation, but look, that part of the work as opposed to Canadians and New Yorker, we're not as individuals responding to it. Yeah. Which I, you know, I was so excited about the profit aspect. Yeah. I wish, I wish I knew. I don't know if anybody else in the room. And it might be as part of, whatever the explanation is for why Europe is ahead of us on greenhouse gases or whatever. Over in Europe, they don't seem to, I mean, if we stick with the greenhouse gases or whatever, the environmental, the government doesn't seem to regard the environmental movement as the enemy. They don't always win, but they seem to get to sit around the same table as industry and the government doesn't think you're trying to overthrow the country just because you're trying to. And over here, I don't see that same attitude. The government seems very, sort of against the environmental movement and against the animal movement. But why that is? I mean, it's not that animals aren't property in Europe. Like they are here. Everybody likes to point to the arts. It's all because animals are property. Well, I mean, that's a big part of it, but animals are property in Germany too. But if you had to be a farmed animal in Germany or Canada, you'd choose Germany in terms of getting to walk around before you get killed. So I don't know, why are they? What is it about Europe? Thank you. Natural making bombs and things like that. So if you look at the history of the animal liberation movement in Britain, that's a part of that, particularly Britain. I wanted to ask another question, which is, you've been going to talk about the big things being under-regulated, but in actual fact, is there an area where it's over-regulated? And you probably see where I'm going, which is animal use in universities, which is one on one. And that, it's not true that there isn't an Ottawa thing on this. There's a CCAC, Animal Cancer Primal Care. And their control over animal use in universities has got more and more stringent about what about adjectives we want to use. So some scientists in the university who are allegedly about to prove human health may be finding it more difficult to work on animals because of the larger condition of this area. So in fact, it's gone the other way. It would be my view. That's a good question. And I didn't talk about the regulation of experimentation on animals in Canada. Interestingly, I just came from, I sit on Dalhousie's university committee in the laboratory, and I just came from a four-hour meeting. We meet the third Thursday of every month to review the protocol. So I know a little bit about what you're talking about. And certainly from the point of view of the scientists who are trying to do good things, there's a whole lot of paperwork you have to do. And, you know, whether from the point of view of the animals, that's any great benefit. But certainly the sort of the bureaucracy, the time it takes as a researcher to have to justify what you're doing has increased. And I think that's one of the points of view, right? Just as the point of view of the humans is on to eat meat. It's the point of view of the animals that don't want to be shot. There's another point of view, which is that you take the time doing that, and you do less of the other. The other thing you didn't talk about, basically, which is related to this, is lobbying. And you talked about the humane society doing this or that, and as if it was a positive thing. But in fact, Peter has been responsible for taking over some of the humane societies. Toronto, one in May, extracting money from them and sort of radicalizing them. So they've got a different point of view. And so the idea that this legislation is being pushed by progressive forces depends on how you define Peter. You define it as a progressive force or as a terrorist organization, like Shane Fain versus the RRA. Good point. I want to say one more thing about animal experimentation, just to do a follow-up. Your talk about over-regulation may be fair in the context of organizations that are covered by the CCAC, like the universities and the hospitals, are private labs don't have to belong to the CCAC. They are not covered by that. They are covered only by the criminal code of Canada, which I told you about before. Anybody want to guess which would apply to the universities as well? Anybody want to guess how many prosecutions have been brought in Canada against experimenters on animals? In CCAC, it's not regulated as well. Oh, yeah. But the criminal code applies as well. Yeah, zero, right? Because, you know, who's going into the labs? And probably there isn't that much of you. Probably whatever is suffering, and sometimes it might be awful, is justified at least under the law. But talk about over-regulation. Who's in there checking? It's not on the beat of any count. It's not in Britain. On the point about the sort of the radicalization of humane societies, it is interesting. They can very remarkably, and that might be another source for change, in that you can have some humane societies, you know, they're often broke up provincially in Ontario, so you get one humane society one time with one attitude and another in the next. And some of them just seem to like to catch a lot of dogs, so they can sell them to the labs and get a lot of money and take vacations in Florida. They're not really very pro-animal at all. And you get some others that are very influenced by the sorts of agendas that you just said. And there have been some very interesting sort of power struggles within humane societies between the sort of group that's trying to take it over to do some radical lobbying and so on. A point about the lobbying, and then I'll leave this one go, humane societies are not entitled to do much political work or SPCA's because they lose their charitable, I can see my tax colleague here is not, you lose your charitable status if you do that because then you become political. So you can save one cat at a time but if you devote half your budget into lobbying the federal government to change the laws, you lose your charitable status. So they're sort of constrained from acting systemically. There's nothing to do with that. It's not a statute that enacts of any new standards. It's simply said for all the standards that are out there and on a long list of statutes you can proceed by this informal quick not criminal, not criminal penalty issue a ticket. Root. And it didn't actually erase the criminal. You can still do prosecutions but they don't anymore. The notion is that prosecution is and compliance is better achieved by not stigmatizing things through the criminal process. Just basically make it a tax. I don't know. I don't have an answer to that. Does the law care about non-human animals because they're valued in Jersey or what they mean to us? I think both. I mean potentially the criminal code if you look at it it looks like it's a bad thing to cause suffering to animals and that would seem to be because of what they are intrinsically. It's got some other provisions that obviously deal with what they mean to us. Let me give you an example. It's a and this just goes back to the fact that it hasn't been changed for a long time. It's a greater offense to injure the neighbor's cattle than to injure your neighbor's dog. Why is that? Is that the cattle suffer more than the dog? Well I don't think so. They're likely to be more expensive. Or they were in Queen Victoria's day where they were crucial to the big chattel that anybody would own and dogs were cheap. There's no explanation for why it attracts a bigger penalty to injure your neighbor's cow than to injure your neighbor's cat. It's only explicable that they only matter because of what they mean to people but that's not the only provision out there. So it's a mix. They work with the blind. They work with our dogs. But what do cats do? They work with companion animals. But it seems like cities cherish a dog more than a cat. I mean over 200,000 feral cats in our past. They're taken care of because they're somewhat status symbol or because they're workers, you know, they mean to people. They do something inside. Yeah, there's more statutes dealing with dogs than almost all other animals put to the dog liability acts and especially the dogs of the animal that's been domesticated the longest. I could talk the whole hour on dog law. There's lots of dog statutes out there doing a whole bunch of weird special provision on dogs that chase sheep. That's an interesting question. One area there's obviously a lot of tension but that is generated by this notion of treating animals as property because many of us regard them as more like family members are not quite the same as our human family members but closer to that than our tables and chairs and there's been a number of interesting court decisions in recent years dealing with how much money you give a human in compensation for their typically dog or cat who's been killed. Not necessarily intentionally but just run over by a careless driver or sometimes killed by your neighbor's rottweiler. The traditional rule was you just got market value and given you can get a dog from the pylon for free, you didn't get very much. If you had a very expensive show dog that was something but somebody has a 10 year old dog, how much can you sell that for? Well, not much and that's basically what you got. In recent years the courts have been recognizing the emotional attachment that we feel to companion animals in particular and edging things up a bit not massively so you get large amounts but a couple thousand dollars for things that sometimes comes into sometimes it suits against negligent veterinarians who accidentally kill a dog or something. Some slight progress to saying that unlike other channels it's not just market value and in fact in the United States, not in Canada there's actually been some legislation on that. Tennessee's got a statute called the Tebow Act passed by or advocated by a Tennessee senator a dog named Tebow got killed and he didn't get much money for it so he passed a law saying the courts can order and I forget what, $2,000 for emotional stress for a dog. Didn't apply to farm dogs for some reason, I don't know just suburban dogs presumably farmers don't care about the dog that's the story. So it's not just courts it's been some legislatures and there may well be other states and things by way of saying hey the traditional market value approach to an intentionally or carelessly killed companion animal doesn't reflect reality. You started the lecture by talking about how in your first class you would talk about law through sort of my soapbox issue that I like to talk about. Do you know of any jurisdictions that would include invertebrates or like fish and all that and sort of their animal cruelty stuff? Well again the criminal code of Canada doesn't have a definition so in theory you could bring it under there but no prosecutor ever had it's always been mammals and birds. I mentioned one case of a reptile but it was one of these animal quarters who you know they'd be finding their house and they've got 54 cats and six dogs but they had a turtle too they weren't taking care of that either so it was prosecution for all of them including the turtle but apart from that one case nobody cares or has cared about it and it would be an interesting question as to whether a court would say a lobster is an animal for the purpose of the criminal code. I mean we all know biologically they are but I'm not sure what a court would say about that so no it's pretty much nothing I'm curious what the difference is between activities like dog fighting and rodeo because it doesn't seem to be entertainment based on the suffering of an animal where do we have to learn between one being legal and the other being one being illegal? Well I just think it's in my sense it's just very informed by the broad social more is that most people think rodeos are family fine and they would take their kids to them and I mean obviously there's much more to it than that but the animals in dog fighting are much more routinely badly hurt than the animals in rodeos are so I wouldn't want to underplay that but I think it's you know we do have an absolute bar against dog fighting all the provisions in the criminal code but there's a specific provision no dog fighting provision but obviously we could change our views as to rodeos than the courts might change too That's sort of an issue of degree right now Well I don't know I think a friend in the back row could go a long way between the difference between rodeos and dog fights but some people say jeez it's really the same they're a lot more similar than the traditional view, what's that? One involves gambling Scambling is sorry the two dogs fighting the rodeo and serving the humans is that you know when defining pain it's physical, I wanted to make the argument I think too that in any form of animal entertainment some of the pain has nothing to do with psychological emotions science has proved in it that today to say that animals do not feel or think so the pathologist Mark Bacoff who is an animal definitely argued that animals have you know I would like to see move in that way but he would ban dog fighting because they experience physical pain occurring to other parts but I would like to see rodeos ban and bull fighting them because they're causing psychological pain and emotional pain That's good I thought of one comment to your question about where is the leadership I didn't have an answer but for I see a few students in their audience and there is a student group who has learned about animal welfare and if you're a student at the law school and you don't know about that come up to me afterwards and I can put you in touch with them you're not alone because you're called the Canadian agriculture lobby really the food supply is determined or food is determined by the provincial it's designated provincially by the health difference the Canadian agriculture lobby isn't giving it an authority that really doesn't exist could we not vote could we not vote provincially right my recollection of where I used to phrase agricultural lobby was in the defeating of the updating amendment to the criminal code specifically speaking about the Canadian condoms association shows up before the farm committee and says don't do this it'll put us on business I understand we're voting state on a state basis but we vote we need that the federal criminal code well no the provinces could do things under their provincial legislation so it's both I just wanted to ask her are they killing the girls sled dogs and whistler obviously the dogs they were allowed then to kill them because of their property there's not really much of a case there well there may be people in the room who know more about this than I do if they own the dogs they are entitled under the current interpretation of the criminal code's cruelty provision to kill them they can't do it in an unnecessarily cruel fashion so if they shot one dog while the other was watching and caused this panic that was unnecessary as opposed to taking them out and doing it one by one so nobody knew what was happening till it was over there wouldn't be anything wrong with that but I'm going to use this as a platform to get back to what I said about the criminal code provision there's no reason a court couldn't say in a situation like that we reinterpret it that you have to before you can do that you have to make a reasonable effort to see whether somebody would want to give those dogs a happy home but it's unnecessary even to cause them a relatively painless death without exploring that option assuming it could be explored relatively cheap but I don't actually see anything in the criminal code that would prevent a court from saying you know before you can kill a perfectly healthy animal that someone might love you know post something on the internet and ask if anybody wants them or whatever that doesn't seem impossible but it has nothing like that so how difficult would it be would it cause a lot of people in the economy and Canadian law federal areas of Canadian life or would it be for other countries I've tried for my course to dig back to see if I could find one case back in 1222 where they first decided that and you can't find it there's been not just in the common law but in Roman law and everything that's even roughly analogous to us indigenous law systems whether they might have some hope for anything I think it would be a massively radical change part of what I would want to know is change it from property to what because I'm not sure anybody's given me the best alternative it seems like a laudable but difficult to grasp goal I think I have to sort of imagine what it would be like and it's important to think imaginably about that and try to think about what that world would be like but it's how you get from here to there is not something I know yeah I think maybe what I'm going to do because it we said till 730's take one more and then give people who want to run the chance to sort of exit on mass and then if other people want to continue that's fine but I think we'll do one more question and then I'll say good night and if everybody wants to go but leave a small but select group yes it puts dignity on which may enable future legislations to shift the from criminal law to human rights law maybe I mean that's certainly back to Windsor that's what they're trying to get at with this word guardian it doesn't actually change the law but it's like introducing the word miss you know if we start talking differently we will think that we don't have to designate women's marital status by calling them miss or misses and things change so let's call them guardians I sometimes wonder guardian is the best model because you know I'm a guardian of my children I'm not sure I want to infantilize animals that have to have me be their papa because they've got a lot over me in a lot of respects somehow the guardian model that we associate with you know mentally incompetent persons and infants doesn't seem quite the label for animals either that's why I think I have to think about what other word or relationship we have so listen as I said if people want to stay I'm very happy to do so but it sticker did say you could all get released by 7 30 so I'll thank you for that and