Canada: No Country for Animals

A new documentary will make Canadians ashamed of the animal welfare standards in our country, though it offers limited solutions.

No Country for Animals, a documentary by Karen Pinter and Kevin Newman, which aired on Global TV June 28 and can now be viewed online, exposes Canada’s appalling animal welfare standards and should motivate every decent person to demand immediate changes in how we treat animals. The film points out our moral inconsistency in regarding some animals – mainly dogs and cats – as beloved pets, while subjecting others – those we categorize as “food animals” – to unbearable suffering that has been banned in other countries.

Pinter and Newman also point out that even our treatment of pets is remarkably callous. They note that Quebec is considered the “puppy mill capital of North America,” a province where thousands of puppy mill operations house dogs in ghastly conditions and animal cruelty laws go unenforced. Canada’s laws about the treatment of animals are archaic, remaining essentially unchanged since 1892. As animal rights lawyer Lesli Bisgould notes in the documentary, cruelty is built into Canada’s laws: while they proscribe “unnecessary suffering,” there is an acknowledgement that some suffering is “necessary” for animal exploitation industries to continue with business as usual.

While humane societies have campaigned for a much-needed update, any changes were opposed by those industries in Canada that exploit animals: ranchers, vivisectors, hunters, equestrian groups, and the fur industry all battled against improvements because they feared that any recognition, no matter how slight, that animals were more than commodities would endanger their own interests. In 2008, the Canadian government passed Bill S-203, which slightly increased penalties for some acts of cruelty but left many loopholes, especially for crimes of neglect and breeding animals for fighting. All animal protection groups in Canada opposed the new legislation.

In No Country, Pinter and Newman focus on the treatment of animals raised for food. This is appropriate, since the scale of suffering for these “food animals” is unimaginable, with millions of animals processed through our systems of factory farming, transport, and mass slaughter. Animal cruelty investigator Twyla Francois, from Canadians for the Ethical Treatment of Farm Animals , says that in Canada “farm animals are considered to be nothing” and characterizes Canadian laws on transport of animals as “unbelieveable.” Here, we allow animals to be crammed into trucks with no food or water for 52 hours, whereas in Europe, the limit is 14 hours, and the film shows Italian officials imposing a $5,000 fine on one trucker for carrying five extra animals.

Other countries are described as being “light years ahead of Canada” in terms of how “food animals” are treated. Dutch activists, who consider the standards in their country to be minimal, are astonished to learn about how Canada treats animals. The European Union has banned gestation crates, whereas in Canada, 95 per cent of sows are confined to these small cages for most of their lives, hardly able to move. Cruelty is standard practice towards Canadian “farm animals,” with birds perhaps suffering most. One scene from the documentary shows chickens being “thrown like potatoes” into a transport truck.

Rather than working to improve the treatment of animals, inspectors from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency prioritize the interests of agribusiness, and the agency evidently lacks the will to revise the rules.

While the documentary should create a sense of shame in every Canadian who watches it, the solutions it offers are disappointingly limited. Animal advocates such as Francois and Bisgould and a group of young students pursing studies in animal law all recognize that animal rights are the next great moral revolution. Yet Pinter and Newman don’t venture into a discussion of that philosophy. Their only solution is that Canadians “eat less meat” and source their flesh from what they consider “humane” operations.

Certainly it is preferable for animals not to be raised in the hellish factory farms that are the norm in Canada. But Farmer Fred from Perth Pork, who “adores his pigs,” still sells them for slaughter, in this case to Mario the Healthy Butcher. This is what animal activists dismiss as “Happy Meat,” the hypocritical approach that allows affluent consumers to congratulate themselves for paying 25 to 50 per cent more for animals who do not suffer the standard atrocities but who are still killed to satisfy their appetites for flesh.

The word “vegan” is mentioned exactly once in this documentary, but surely those who wish to avoid the “unnecessary suffering” of animals should seriously consider this as a solution rather than fooling themselves with Happy Meat.