In Ontario, Canada, Animal Cruelty Offenders Pay A Pittance For Their Crimes

A Commentary by Niagara At Large publisher Doug Draper

“The greatness of a nation and its moral progress,” said the late great Indian civil rights activist and humanitarian Mahatma Gandhi, “can be judged by the way its animals are treated.”

With that, it was disgusting to read that Hybrid Turkeys – an Ontario-based corporation and one of the largest breeders and distributors of turkeys for food on the continent – was fined a mere $5,600 after pleading guilty in an Ontario court this August to one count of animal cruelty committed at one of its turkey farms in the Kitchener, Ontario area.

An alleged victim, crippled and in pain, from an undercover video in the Hybrid Turkeys animal cruelty case.

The animal cruelty case, brought to the court by the Ontario Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) after an undercover video, produced by an Ottawa-based animal advocacy group Mercy for Animals Canada, allegedly showed employees inside one of the company’s barns kicking and clubbing turkeys to a point of severely maiming them.

The video, which I am providing a link to further down in this post, was broadcast, in part, on CBC’s Marketplace program and is sickening to watch, although not much more sickening than the joke of a  fine the Ontario court meted out and the fact that charges against five employees caught in the abuse of the birds were dropped.

“This case graphically illustrates the cruel, inhumane, and illegal abuses that turkeys and other farmed animals are forced to endure on Canada’s factory farms,” said Mercy For Animals Canada’s president, Nathan Runkle in an August 24^th media release.  “While we praise law enforcement for securing a landmark cruelty conviction in this case of horrific animal abuse, the meager fine doesn’t fit the crime. This factory farm got a slap on the wrist for clubbing animals over the head. We must do more to protect animals on factory farms from sickening cruelty.”

I’ve been saying the same thing about the meagre penalties Ontario’s courts typically mete out for animal cruelty crimes going back to a horrific case some 13 or so years ago of a stray cat in Toronto named Kensington that was grabbed by three young guys and mutilated alive while they videotaped the whole affair as some kind of grotesque work of “art.”

During the trial, where many in attendance were reportedly repulsed at what they saw in the video, the judge was quoted saying “there are worse ways a cat could die” before sentencing one of the perpetrators to 90 days in jail, to be served on weekends.

Whenever I make the argument that the courts should be meting out much stiffer sentences for animal abuse (after all, the federal and provincial animal cruelty acts now on the books do allow for fines ranging into the tens-of-thousands of dollars and jail sentences of up to five years), I inevitably get some people responding; ‘What’s with you? You seem to care more about animals than people.’

No, I care just as much about both, and here is why.

I doubt that judge who made that callous remark in the Kensington the cat case would want his daughter or granddaughter going out or possibly marrying one of the guys who butchered that cat alive. I doubt most of you would be pleased if a member of your family began dating one of the guys (and they were and almost always are guys) who took a boot or club to the turkeys in that barn.

And there is a damn good reason why you shouldn’t want to get involved with such characters. Study after study done by the FBI in the United States and other law enforcement agencies across the continent have shown that many of those convicted of assaulting and/or killing members of their own family or others had a past history of abusing dogs, cats and/or other animals.

That’s where they got their early training and that’s why I get tired of some of our federal and provincial leaders talking tough on almost every other crime, but not showing more interest in putting the screws to animal abusers.

If you share my views on this then think about getting in touch with your federal and provincial members of the legislature and urging them to support the appointment of judges and prosecutor that treat animal cruelty more seriously as the gateway to committing violent acts on humans that it so often is.

Now here are a few links-

First, here is a link to the undercover video showing acts of abuse in the turkey barn, with a warning before you click on it that you may want to view it when children are not within sight of your screen – http://www.turkeytorture.ca/ .

For more information on the activist group Mercy for Animals Canada click on – http://www.turkeytorture.ca/ .

To read a statement issued by Hybrid Turkeys after the Ontario courts fined it $5,600 for one count of animal cruelty click on –   http://www.hybridturkeys.com/en/hybrid-news-centre/welfare-update-aug-2015/ .

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