Is treating animals as property a barbaric cultural practice?

Last year, activist Anita Krajnc was charged with criminal mischief for giving water to some thirsty pigs, owned by Van Boekel Hog Farms, as they were on their way to being slaughtered in Burlington. In Canada, pigs can be transported for up to 36 hours — and other farm animals for as long as three days — without food, water or rest.

Krajnc was acquitted on May 4, but the Ontario Superior Court’s judgment was no victory for the animals Krajnc tries to comfort. Justice David Harris cleared Krajnc because she did not interfere with the hog farmers’ use of their property by quenching the pigs’ thirst — but he refused to question the underlying premise that pigs are pieces of property whose need for water can be ignored.

“Pigs are not persons and they are property,” Harris held in his decision. “Dogs and cats and other pets are property too, and not persons.” He recognized that the creatures Krajnc gave water to were “upset/stressed, and that they eagerly accepted the water that was offered to them;” expert witnesses at the trial observed that the pigs were panting, frothing at the mouth and squealing, showing that they were overheated, dehydrated and in psychological distress. And yet, the judge found that “the treatment of the pigs complied with the applicable regulations and was therefore lawful.”

Krajnc may be free, but the legal framework that traps millions of animals in lives of captivity, exploitation, and abuse remains as entrenched as ever. This is a framework in which non-human animals are primarily considered property for human use, rendering their pain subordinate to human convenience. Nonliving corporations are treated as legal persons — but living, breathing, hurting animals are not. Canadian criminal law categorizes cruelty to animals as property offences. It took until December 2015 for a Canadian provincial legislature to acknowledge for the first time that animals are not inanimate objects, but “sentient beings” with “biological needs.” Quebec’s Bill 54 has been hailed as a landmark for animals’ rights in Canada.

“Anyone who has ever lived with a pet knows that animals experience emotions and feel both physical and psychological pain,” writes Canadian Federation of Humane Societies CEO Barbara Cartwright, “but this is the first time in North America that these basic truths have been entrenched in law.”

Even so, despite the law’s symbolic appreciation of non-human animals’ capacity to feel, it does not change the basic legal classification of animals as property in the province. (And in application it excludes farm animals, zoo animals, exotic species, and captive wildlife from its protections.) The still-prevalent idea that animals are essentially property means that “in many instances, a relatively trivial human interest is balanced against an animal’s most fundamental interests in not experiencing pain or death, and the human interest nevertheless prevails,” according to American law professor Gary Francione.

The Canadian Criminal Code prohibits causing “unnecessary” pain and injury to animals — meaning that pain and injury rationalized as useful for humans is allowed. Practices that involve extreme suffering for animals — such as tail docking, amputation of beaks and tusks without anaesthetic, castration, and confinement in spaces too tiny to move — are standard in factory farming.

More than 750 million animals are killed for food in Canada every year, and over a million more die while being transported to slaughterhouses, from causes such as extreme temperature exposure or being trampled/asphyxiated because of overcrowding.

Even under recently proposed amendments to Canadian animal transport regulations, cows and chickens and other farm animals can still be shocked with electric prods, and kept in extreme heat or cold without food and water for up to 36 hours.

Canadians get only glimpses of the brutality that lies behind the food we eat, in videos from undercover investigations by animal rights advocates. Hidden camera footage shot at Ontario turkey breeder Hybrid Turkeys in 2014, for example, showed birds with large open wounds, employees being encouraged to kick the birds, and failed euthanizations (including one where a turkey was hit repeatedly with a shovel).

Hybrid Turkey pled guilty and was fined $5,600 for these abuses in 2015. But even more disturbing than the sadistic violence that the law minimally punishes when exposed, is all the everyday violence against animal “property” that is officially permissible.

Canadians get only glimpses of the brutality that lies behind the food we eat, in videos from undercover investigations by animal-rights advocates

Azeezah Kanji is a legal analyst based in Toronto. She writes in the Star every other Thursday.