Rabbit Advocacy Animal Matters

Lakritz: It's time for a charter of rights for animals

November 26, 2014 Naomi Lakritz, columnist for the Calgary Herald

This is going to sound corny, but I don’t care if it does. Besides, other dog (and cat) owners will understand perfectly what I mean when I say that, looking into the eyes of my eight-month-old puppy, I see a highly self-aware, intelligent and sentient being, displaying a range of emotions, looking back at me.

I’ve had the same experience making eye contact with a polar bear in Churchill, Man., that poked its head over the edge of the platform I was standing on in the middle of the tundra and calmly looked at me for a long minute.

In fact, it’s the height of arrogance to assume that we humans are the only species with a claim to sentience and self-awareness. According to Camille Labchuk, a lawyer who practises animal rights law, “Science tells us animals are definitely sentient.” She calls for “a revolution in the way we think about animals,” adding that we need to move away from the “property paradigm.” Hear, hear!

Labchuk is the director of legal advocacy for an organization called Animal Justice, which has drafted an Animal Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The goal, she says, is not to give animals human rights, but to give them animal rights. 

“The charter acknowledges that some animals are under human care and lays out expectations for how we treat those animals. One really important aspect of this is the right to go to court to enforce these rights, something that is completely missing from Canadian law,” Labchuk said in an interview from her Toronto office Tuesday.

Case in point: when animal welfare groups went to court a few years ago on behalf of Lucy, the elephant being kept in isolation at the Edmonton zoo, the case was dismissed by the Alberta Court of Appeal, Labchuk says, “on a massive loophole technicality.” The court’s message? “You don’t have standing to bring this case.” However, Labchuk noted that Chief Justice Catherine Fraser dissented: “She said that as a matter of democracy, we have to start looking at animals as sentient beings with the capacity to suffer, to feel pain.

Switzerland and Germany already mention the significance of animals in their constitutions and India has granted legal personhood to dolphins, which Labchuk calls “a useful way of getting to court.”

A charter of rights would also benefit farm animals. For example, it could stop the practice of male pigs having their tusks torn out with bolt cutters to prevent them from fighting during shipment, and force compliance with the European method, which simply separates the male pigs instead of inflicting such cruel suffering on them. Indeed a report by the Campbell Centre for the Study of Animal Welfare at the University of Guelph says: “Tusks are usually removed using hoof nippers or bolt cutters, and less frequently with orthopedic wire that is used as a ‘saw’ (the recommended method) … As with most routine management procedures performed on-farm painkillers are not used.”

“Animals just aren’t property. The law has to stop treating them as property. They’re not tables and chairs … Animals experience suffering, pain and joy the same way we do,” Labchuk said.

Her group has already chalked up some victories, including helping to end Air Canada’s shipping of monkeys for medical research, intervening in a veterinary school’s practice of having students euthanize a perfectly healthy dog they have just spayed, and saving 350 animals at an Ontario shelter that were destined to be euthanized merely because they had treatable ringworm.

Do you think this is all silly? Look into the eyes of that four-legged creature who shares your home. I dare you to scoff at the idea after that.

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