Disgusting Blood-Sport Brought Back By Premier Doug Ford

Written by: Heather Clemenceau

*Caution – this blog post contains graphic images.

I didn’t think it would be possible to be more disgusted by Doug Ford’s government. Lobbyists must have donated serious money to DoFo’s cash for access “stag and dough” event, to benefit Ford’s developer, police friends, because he is reinstating/expanding a cruel dog “sporting” event. “Bill 91, the Ontario government’s massive Less Red Tape, Stronger Economy Act, 2023, was ordered for third reading in the Legislature on Thursday, May 11, 2023. Schedule 14 of the act would repeal and re-enact section 35 of the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Act, 1997, to provide for new regulations concerning the issuance of licences for new and existing train and trial areas. These regulation changes would include granting new licences through a one-time 90-day application period and allowing licences to be transferred to new owners.”

This type of “training” technique is one that the Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry (MNR) has been phasing out since 1997: dogs running down terrified captive coyotes, foxes and rabbits who are kept penned in tiny enclosures in between torture sessions where they are mutilated. There are now 33,000 members in the Ontario Sporting Dog Association, which lobbied the government over the past year on the training and trialing licenses. (David McNew/The Associated Press).

Hunter grins while his dogs attack a coyote

These facilities should be illegal – this is animal cruelty plain and simple, and disgusting that anyone would refer to it as a “sport.” Additionally, dogs that are forced to participate can also suffer from injuries or even death at these events. Penned dog hunting licenses are banned in every other province. Moreover, how will dogs who are trained to be vicious, distinguish between coyotes, foxes, and rabbits and innocent smaller breeds of dogs, especially in provincial parks?

Newmarket Today published this excellent letter by Sharon Willan of Aurora, and she follows up with a request for readers to contact their MP:

“If you found your child torturing a cat, dog, bird, or any animal, you would be very concerned. In the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the American Psychiatrist Association cites harming animals as a sign of conduct disorder. The technical term is Zoosadism, pleasure derived from harming animals.

Why then is penned dog hunting considered a sport for adults? Wild animals are taken from their environment, placed in small cages and held in barns. They are released only to have dogs chase them to exhaustion and possibly kill them. If the wild animal survives, they are recaptured, placed in cages and sold to another penned dog organization to be hunted again and again.

In 1997, penned dog hunting was banned. However. there are 24 still operating in Ontario. Instead of closing these down, the government of Ontario is expanding the licensing so that more animals can be tortured.”Penned hunting is widely condemned, controversial, and causes extreme and unnecessary stress, suffering, and death to wild animals, while posing threats to public health and safety at the same time.” All other provinces and many states in the U.S. have banned this cruel practice but the extreme segment of “hunting lobby groups like the Ontario Federation of Anglers and Hunters and the Ontario Sporting Dogs Association are pushing the government to reverse the ban so that new dog hunting pens can open up, and existing pens can sell to new owners.” (Animal Justice, June 23, 2023)The members of these associations should read about the mental disorders associated with this torture of animals.

What kind of people have we elected who would allow this kind of antisocial behaviour to be the law? What are we teaching our youth about respecting life including the lives of animals?

Anyone who has owned a pet has grieved over their pet’s illness and pain. They have seen the suffering the animal is going through. Wild animals are no different — they suffer. The dogs who are forced to join in the hunt also suffer. Under normal circumstances, they would not be part of this heinous act.

If you are appalled about this law, please write to your local MPP and demand an end to penned dog hunting.”

Sharon Willan
Aurora

Society should do everything possible to protect wild animals, they have a place within the ecosystem and should never be subjected to this kind of torture, for the amusement of humans.

Find your MPP here

At The 11th Hour, Paranoid Hunting And Fishing Groups Lobby Hard Against Bill C-246

Every year in Canada more than 100,000 complaints of animal cruelty are investigated  Today,  Nathaniel  Erskine-Smith’s private member’s bill, C-246, goes to a vote to see if it will move forward to a Commons Committee.  “There’s been a ton of confusion about the bill. Am I giving animals rights? The right not to be tortured and abused, if we want to call those rights,” Erskine-Smith said in the House last week. Additionally, Canadian Federation of Humane Societies CEO Barbara Cartwright says she’s baffled by some of the opposition, saying it’s based on hyperbole and irrational fear, given that the bill is clearly aimed at criminal, deviant behaviour.“This is about ending animal abuse, not ending animal use.What does ensuring that all animals are protected from sexual abuse have to do with fishing? What does animal fighting have to do with farming practices? What does it have to do with hunting? They aren’t linked.”

In this ideological battle, the pre-Darwinian thinkers who oppose reasonable updates to an ancient law, have not responded to reason, and have taken out full page ads in The Hill Times (paid subscription required to view) Canada’s political newsweekly for October 3, 2016.

 

Grumpy Old Men – The Orchestrated Attack On Bill C-246

Written by:  Heather Clemenceau

Since 1999, the Liberals have made numerous attempts to pass a much-needed update to the antiquated and inadequate animal cruelty provisions in the Criminal Code of Canada. There was Bill C-17, resurrected as Bill C-15 and then re-introduced as Bill C-15B, followed by Bill C-10, Bill C-10B, Bill C-22, Bill C-50, Bill C-274, Bill C-277 and, finally, Bill C-610. While the House of Commons has passed new animal cruelty legislation three times, those Bills were either prorogued by the government or blocked by the Senate before they made it past the finish line. The Canadian Federation of Humane Societies provides an excellent overview of the Bills here.

Toronto-area Liberal MP Nathaniel Erskine-Smith, recently introduced a Private Members Bill (C-246)  – the Modernizing Animal Protections Act, to reinforce Canada’s public policy and legislative commitments to animal welfare (World Animal Protection ranks Canada’s animal welfare laws a “D” on a scale of A-G).  Only the United Kingdom, Austria, Switzerland, and New Zealand scored “A” grades on the index.  The Bill will be debated in the House of Commons on May 9^th.

Despite rampant paranoia, the law is focused on eliminating the loopholes that allow chronic hoarders, repeat abusers, puppy mill operators and dog fighting perpetrators to get off with a slap on the wrist. It would create a new offence for individuals who cause unnecessary pain, suffering, or injury to an animal through gross negligence of the animal’s welfare. The Bill also sets out to achieve several key measures that are entirely reasonable and should win broad support:

• Prohibition of dog and cat fur importation
• Banning of shark-finning
• Prohibitition the use of live animals in target shooting
• Establishment of penalties for the killing and injuring a police dog
• Prohibition of the training or breeding of animals for the purpose of fighting, as well as making it illegal to profit from dog fighting.

Enter Robert Sopuck, the Conservative MP for Dauphin-Swan River-Neepaw. Sopuck and his cabal of trigger-happy, pre-Darwinian animal killers are so paranoid that hunting and fishing activities will result in cruelty charges, (I wish!) they have created numerous websites and Facebook pages to spread false information and extol the mythical virtues of hunting while proclaiming their services as absolutely necessary for controlling wildlife populations and preserving the environment. These pages feature Sopuck and others dressed up in a variety of machismo fashions, exhibiting unusual levels of arousal while carrying an arsenal of weaponry as they blast into the forests and streams to conduct their primitive rituals.

Sopuck himself proceeded to write a preposterous Toronto Sun article claiming that Erskine-Smith’s Bill will give animals human rights. Clearly channelling former Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz, he writes that “Canada already has adequate measures to protect animals and prevent cruelty. Furthermore, all animal uses are covered by veterinary-approved Codes of Practise that guide what you can do with your animals.”  Those “guides” are just that.  They are meaningless because they are not laws.  And they are not “veterinary approved” either – they are the result of inputs from the agriculture industry.  How is it that Sopuck believes we have adequate protections when there are hundreds of entries in the caselaw database of the Canadian Federation of Humane Societies, with many of those not prosecuted successfully.  Very few animal cruelty cases are prosecuted each year in comparison to the number of cases that are investigated. It is estimated that less than 10% of cases that warrant prosecution are successfully prosecuted.

Lawyer Peter Sankoff lobs a nuclear strike at Sopuck in this deconstruction of Sopuck’s Toronto Sun article.  In the end,  Sankoff finds that virtually all of Sopuck’s claims range from the merely overstated to the downright preposterous – finding none of his claims to be accurate:

 

 

Despite the hunting propaganda which I have read on the Ontario Federation of Anglers and Hunters website, the reality is that most modern families do not embrace hunting as either a pleasurable pastime or a family adventure. In 2010, almost 3.3 million adult anglers participated in a variety of recreational fishing activities in Canada, the majority of whom fall into the 45-64 year age range (If the downward trend in hunting continues, by the year 2050, hunters will only comprise 1% of the population).   Depending on what source you read, about 2-7% of the population are hunters; of course this doesn’t include poachers or treaty hunters who don’t require licenses.  In any case both numbers represent a significant minority of Canadians.  So you have your acknowledged 2-10% of the population righteously informing everyone else that it is only they who are picking up the tab for wildlife conservation – part time at that.

That dog doesn’t hunt, sorry.

Canadians have been signing animal welfare petitions for decades now, demanding that the values of fairness and justice that we’re known for are applied to the protection of animals and to the punishment of animal abusers. Laws are essential to both codify and enforce positive changes for animals. Why should we be one of the only countries that does not yet prohibit the importation of dog and cat fur, because self-serving groups and a few old conservative politicians, who are clearly a product of Stephen Harper, are arguing against reasonable updates to an ancient law.  The fact that Sopuck and the hunting/fishing groups believe that Bill C-246 seeks the “complete elimination of animal use in Canada” indicates that none of them can read. If the Conservatives feel the Bill is “fundamentally flawed,” why don’t they draft their own Bill as they frequently threaten to do?  Their objection is based on the desire to kill animals for the sheer delight it brings them – the rest of the world will move on into the next century without them. Compassion for the natural world is the new order.

You can read the details of Nate Erskine-Smith’s Bill below: