Let's just give animals a break

Passing a law to stop torture and abuse would be a useful start

by Thomas Walkom, Toronto Star, April 9, 2002

LAST YEAR, three young men abducted a cat, took it into an empty Toronto house and systematically tortured it. They gouged out one of its eyes, gutted it and skinned it --all while the animal, crying in pain, was alive.

At one point, one of the young men stuck his face in the viscera of thedisembowelled but still struggling cat, and sniffed.

All of this is known because the three videotaped their actions.
Two of these young men, Jesse Power and Anthony Wennekers, have pleaded guilty to charges of animal cruelty and mischief. They are due to be sentenced on April 18.

The third man, known only as Matt, is still at large. His two colleagues have declined to identify him further.

There are so many disturbing elements about this crime that it is hard to know where to begin.

Begin first with the law. Current penalties for abusing animals are ludicrously weak. If Power, Wennekers and the mysterious Matt had tortured their own cat, they would be subject to - at maximum - six months in jail.

They also might have been prevented from owning and torturing another cat for up to two years.

Only the fact that they took someone else's animal has left the two open to more serious jail time. Cats are still viewed as property; damage to property (unlike damage to mere living animals) is viewed seriously in this country.

As a result, Power and Wennekers could get two years for committing the crime of mischief.

Toughening up the animal torture aspects of the Criminal Code might seem a no-brainer. And in its own lackadaisical way, the federal government has been trying to do that with its Bill C-15B.

But it has been an arduous three-year battle, fought every step of the way by the entrenched animal industries - the farm lobbies, the hunting lobby, the research lobby.

All are worried that if animals were given more protection from the Wennekerses and Powers of the world, this would be the thin edge of the wedge.

If it were deemed a serious crime to torture a cat in a Toronto squat, who knows where matters would end? University professors who carve into beagles' brains might find themselves discomfited. Farmers might be reluctant to engage in moneymaking but morally dubious "accepted industry practices."

What would that do to agricultural productivity, not to mention global competitiveness?

Bill C-15B was back in the Commons again yesterday. And in spite of last-ditch attempts by anti-animal MPs in the Canadian Alliance to scupper it, the bill may even become law. That would mean that future cat torturers could face five years in jail.

But there are other unsettling elements of this court case. One has to do with art and what is, apparently, considered acceptable among the avant-garde these days.

Jesse Power's defence is that he was making art.

He argues that he is a vegetarian (a statement his own psychiatrist called "duplicitous") and that he was just trying to demonstrate that bad things happen to animals that are eaten.

He said he planned to eat the cat he tortured.

He also said the video was a rough cut for a future art project. This might sound unlikely to some. But court heard that Power had already submitted a video to his integrated media class at the Ontario College of Art and Design, in which he chopped the head from a chicken before cooking and eating it.

He got a good mark in that course.

Laura Matthews, who as the college's public relations spokeswoman is saddled with the unenviable job of dealing with this issue, explained that the institution does not condone cat torture but that the chicken killing was "part of a regular process, done in a humane way and provided a reasonable social comment."

That social comment, presumably, was that animals are killed for food.

Call me crazily old-fashioned, but I am not convinced that engaging in the practice you are protesting against is serious social criticism. It is rather like arguing that Hitler was using Auschwitz to make a social comment about anti-Semitism.

There's a whole weird world out there - of animal snuff videos and zoophiles - people who have sex with animals. Power apparently filed his material occasionally to a self-styled Goth/Rave web site featuring rape videos.

As an avowed member of the non avant-garde, I think we should stop messing with animals and just give them a break. That means not torturing them. That also means not debasing them.

It also means having our legislators pass laws that will allow this to happen - of which Bill C-15B is a very small, but useful, beginning.