How much 'worse' could cat's death have been?
by Peter Worthington -- Toronto Sun, September 24, 2002
Reporter Nick Pron, of the Star, wrote over the weekend that the judge's extraordinary comment in the infamous cat-torture case last April, had been purged from the official court record.
The Toronto case, which more than any in memory underlines the urgency to update the penalty for cruelty to animals, reverberated around the world for its sadism.
Two young men, Jesse Power, 22, and Tony Wennekers, 25, pleaded guilty to catching a stray cat, hanging it, punching it, kicking and stabbing it, gouging out an eye, tearing off an ear, then slitting it open and skinning it when it was still alive - and capturing on video the whole sordid ordeal, including the cat's agonized moans.
The Crown sought a maximum 21/2-year sentence for mischief and cruelty to an animal (cruelty alone entails only six months in jail, a sentence dating back to the 1890s).
Judge Edward Ormston sentenced Power to 90 days in jail, to be served on weekends, and let Wennekers off with the 10 months he had already served while awaiting trial.
In passing sentence, the judge made the remark which was later purged from the court transcript, and which flabbergasted and appalled almost everyone who heard or read it: "There are worse ways that this cat could have died."
There are? What ways? Ripped limb from limb? Boiled in oil? Forced to listen to Jean Chretien speeches?
In fact, it's hard to think of a more monstrous death than the one these guys inflicted on this animal - as an "art" project, they initially claimed, later saying it was a testimonial against slaughtering animals for food.
That the judge's comment is now missing from the court transcript has everyone upset - animal activists, a prominent law professor - and the Crown attorney who is appealing the astonishingly soft sentence to Power, a main protagonist in the torture-killing.
People concerned about cruelty - and not only animal rights zealots - want Parliament to get on with passing the cruelty section of Bill C-15 which would toughen the Criminal Code against cruelty to animals - raising the maximum sentence from six months to five years.
Farmers, hunters and others are uneasy that if the cruelty bill passes, animal rights nutbars will abuse it to charge those whose livelihoods hinge on animals. This has been endlessly refuted, but still the fear persists.
A civilized society should abhor cruelty or torture more than any other crime. A quick death is a merciful death. A slow death is a cruel death.
It is incumbent on society to ensure that killing animals for food be done as humanely and decently as possible.
Personally, I think the maximum five-year sentence proposed in Bill C-15 verges on the lenient.
For acts of perverted cruelty, there should be little difference between a two-legged or four-legged animal.
It's well documented that cruelty to animals can lead to cruelty to humans: torture one, and you can torture the other.
The skinned-cat case leads to another controversial issue of "judicial editing" of judgments, apart from correcting grammatical slips and punctuation.
To us laymen, it seems so obvious it hardly needs emphasizing: the words and meaning of a judgment should not be changed after the fact to imply something that was not said or meant.
In this case, the question begs: What worse ways could this cat have died? But even that isn't the point.
What was going on in the minds of the two guys who committed this atrocity? All of us should hope the Crown's appeal succeeds, and that Parliament passes a new cruelty law.
Sadly, the only way that's likely to happen is if people petition, write, phoneand make nuisances of themselves to those in power.
