Rabbit Advocacy Animal Matters

Dog walker's jail sentence shows courts getting tougher on animal cruelty

Thursday, January 29, 2015 The Daily Brew/Canada News

The surprise in the case was not that the Vancouver-area dog walker was convicted of allowing six animals in her care to die of heat stroke in the back of her pickup truck, then lying about it.

After all, she pleaded guilty last fall to leaving the dogs in the truck while she went shopping and, returning to find them dead, dumped them in a ditch on a country road. Then she concocted a story that they’d been stolen while she was in the washroom at an off-leash park.

No, the surprise was when provincial court Judge Jim Jardine on Wednesday sentenced Paulsen to six months in jail – three months for allowing animals to continue to suffer and three more for mischief in connection with her elaborate cover-up, which included tearful TV interviews about the purported theft. She’s also banned from working with animals for life and from owning them for 10 years.

The dead dogs’ owners and their supporters broke into applause after Jardine passed down his sentence. "I was very relieved," Jennifer Myers, whose dog Buddy was among those killed, told CBC News. “I mean it can’t take away what [the dogs] went through, but at least it shows that yes, it was serious and the judge took it that way.”

The result came three years after the furor triggered when Robert Fawcett dodged jail time for inhumanely slaughtering 100 surplus sled dogs on the orders of a Whistler company that no longer needed them when tourism crashed after the Olympics. Fawcett received probation, community service, a $1,500 fine and a three-year ban on commercial involvement with animals.

The Paulsen sentence is a sign the justice system may now be taking animal-cruelty cases more seriously. “It’s certainly not where we want it to be at, but an interesting trend I believe has started,” Barbara Cartwright, chief executive officer of the Canadian Federation of Human Societies, told Yahoo Canada News.

Cartwright pointed to an Ottawa case last June when Stephen Helfer was given a two-year jail sentence for beating his mother’s dog, Breezy, during an argument. The 18-month-old dog suffered severe injuries but survived.

The judge in that case referenced 2008 legislation that boosted Criminal Code penalties for animal cruelty to a maximum of five years in prison, saying it provided clear direction that Canadians want to see stricter punishment for such crimes. “So she used that as a direct reference and that will become case law,” said Cartwright. “It’s taken a while to filter through, but we will start to see more proportional sentencing, which is what we’ve been missing.”

The B.C. case this week coincides with the federation’s launch of its National Centre for the Prosecution of Animal Cruelty. It aims to educate provincial Crown prosecutors and also provide them, judges and the public with a national database of case law to guide them in sentencing.

The Centre has scheduled a conference for this fall that will bring two prosecutors from each province and territory together to network and for peer-to-peer training, said Cartwright. It’s hoped they’ll return home and push to emulate B.C.’s decision to appoint one prosecutor to act as a central resource for animal-cruelty cases. “That has made an absolute world of difference,” Marcie Moriarty, chief prevention and enforcement officer for the B.C. SPCA, told Yahoo Canada News.

While the B.C. sentence was gratifying, a case next door in Alberta shows the justice system still has a way to go when dealing with animal cruelty. The Alberta SPCA has seized a total of 201 injured and malnourished dogs from a Milk River property belonging to April Irving. The woman was under a prohibition dating from 2010 not to possess more than two dogs, stemming from a case in Saskatchewan that resulted in a $5,000 fine.

But that conviction came under Saskatchewan’s Animal Protection Act, not the federal Criminal Code, which meant Irving did not have a criminal record that would show up in any database. It left her free to accumulate a hoard of dogs in Alberta. “Without a federal charge, the person does not get a criminal record that follows them province to province,” said Cartwright.

A majority of cases in Canada are prosecuted under provincial and territorial animal-cruelty laws rather than the Criminal Code, often because it is easier to obtain a conviction. But those laws are a checkerboard; some are quite strict while others treat live animals simply as property, like furniture.

The Canadian arm of the Animal Legal Defense Fund ranks B.C., Manitoba, Ontario and Nova Scotia as having the toughest laws, while the Northwest Territories, Nunavut and Quebec rate lowest.

After years of foot-dragging, the Quebec government has been working to update its legislation following several high-profile cases involving inhumane puppy-mill operations, said Cartwright. “It is getting better,” she said. “It has always been dismal but they are actually working on it because of all these puppy-mill cases that come up.” Some provinces, such as B.C., have strengthened their laws. “It sometimes takes a tragedy to make things happen,” she said.

Revision to old law getting stalled

But many provincial laws, Alberta’s for example, have no provision for jail sentences. Animal-welfare officials would prefer Criminal Code prosecutions but several attempts to update 1890s-era federal legislation were consistently stymied in the last decade, either dying on the order paper or blocked in the Senate.

Cartwright said despite assurances from the Department of Justice, agriculture, hunting and fishing groups worried their activities could be curtailed by revised cruelty laws. “It was fear-mongering and the more you fear-monger, people who do hunt and fish, people who do take care of livestock, become nervous,” she said. “The average Canadian, I think, would be dumbfounded to realize just how impossible it seems to be to move this through.”

The only success was the 2008 Criminal Code amendments that increased penalties for a conviction. But stiffer sentences are meaningless if you can’t get the cases in front of a judge in the first place, she said. “We need more cases coming to the courts with charges under the Criminal Code, more convictions and therefore better sentencing,” said Cartwright.