Animals deserve dignity, respect

To the editor,

Just over a month after the article “Women bear witness at livestock auction” was posted and the subsequent response “Woman who visited livestock auction missing the point,” video footage has been released of this same auction showing a cow being aggressively jabbed with a cane in her sensitive underside, punched in her engorged udder, and shoved multiple times with a metal gate, all while workers yelled at the distressed animal.

This kind of behaviour is unacceptable and the group “Animal Justice” is already filing animal cruelty complaints for these acts. People view activists as “extreme” but this is exactly why they are necessary.

If someone were to treat a cat or a dog like this, nearly everyone would be outraged, but because cows are considered a commodity and not a living

had changed their minds about Confederation, Smith was forced to resign and Tilley was returned to power. New Brunswick entered Confederation in 1867.

■ In 1870, a Metis firing squad executed Ontario adventurer Thomas Scott for attempting to overthrow Louis Riel’s government at Manitoba’s Red River Colony. The sentence ultimately led to Riel’s execution 15 years later.

■ In 1908, a fire at Lake View School in Collinwood, Ohio, claimed the lives of 172 children and three adults.

■ In 1946, Communist MP Fred Rose and 13 others were charged with spying for the Soviet Union. being, most people will not care about this. Somehow, because an animal is considered a food source, violence against them is tolerated and even expected.

If people are going to eat animals, the least they can do is treat them with dignity and respect. Animal abuse is illegal against all animals, not just those considered as pets.

I was born and raised in Truro, and right now, I am ashamed to say so.

Joel Adams,

Hubbards

■ In 1961, John Diefenbaker became the first Canadian prime minister to officially visit Belfast and Dublin.

■ In 1971, Pierre Elliott Trudeau married Margaret Sinclair in Vancouver, becoming the first prime minister to marry while in office. They had three children – all boys – before separating in 1977 and divorcing in 1984.

■ In 1975, television cameras were allowed to record the regular proceedings of Parliament for the first time. The cameras were allowed to film a session of the Senate committee on legal and constitutional affairs.

Only 39 light-years away, astronomers have found seven planets circling a very small “red dwarf” star called Trappist-1. All seven are in or near what we call the “Goldilocks zone”: not too hot, not too cold, but just right for water to remain liquid on the planet. So we all speculate once again, but a little more bravely this time, about whether some of these planets might be home to life.

Not only are three of Trappist-1’s planets dead centre in the Goldilocks zone, the other four are on the fringes of the habitable zone. And they are all big enough – from half Earth’s size to slightly bigger than our home planet – to retain an atmosphere for billions of years.

That’s long enough for life to evolve on one or more of them. It’s probably even long enough for complex life forms to evolve there, as it did on Earth.

If an intelligent life form evolved on even one of these planets, it could have colonized all seven; they are very close together. The journey would be not much more demanding than a trip from the Earth to the moon.

So think about that, a sevenworld interplanetary civilization. It may not exist at Trappist-1 – we cannot yet assume that life crops up everywhere that the circumstances are suitable for it. But it surely must exist in one or many (or most) of the hundreds of millions of similar star systems that exist in this galaxy alone.

It looks like life is as common as dirt in the universe, which for living creatures like us is infinitely more interesting than a dead universe ruled only by physics and chemistry. Whereas the poor scientists, shackled by their duty to go not one millimetre further than the evidence will currently support, are condemned to say cool, restrained things like:

“The discovery of multiple rocky planets with surface temperatures that allow for liquid water make this amazing system an exciting future target in the search for life.” (Dr. Chris Copperwheat of Liverpool John Moores University, which provided one of the telescopes used in the study.)

Of course, Dr. Copperwheat really knows that this discovery makes it 99 per cent certain (it was already 98 per cent certain) that life is commonplace throughout the universe. He just must not say so until we actually find hard evidence for life on one of the almost 4,000 “exoplanets” orbiting other stars that astronomers have found in the past 24 years.

But I am a journalist, and I am allowed to speak obvious truths even when the scientific evidence is still falling a bit short. Planets are self-evidently as common as dirt. Life is almost certainly as common as dirt.