It’s odd, just last night I was lamenting over the fact that nobody seems to give a damned about all these animal cruelty cases that you and I read about every day. Dozens show up in my Google alert every single day and it is extremely depressing to have to read them all. Especially when it seems like nobody cares.
Between some thug beating the crap out of a wee 5 month old puppy to a multi-billion dollar corporation like Coke who doesn’t seem to care that they are sponsoring blatant animal cruelty by funding rodeos, it all sometimes seems like the road for the animal welfare advocate is paved with “doomed to fail” aspirations.
But maybe, just maybe there is a wee light at the end of the tunnel. Maybe with the accessibility that everyone has to news almost as it happens with the internet, the ability to comment, to read other comments, to interact with and learn from online advocates, maybe the general public is beginning to pull it’s collective head of it’s collective butt. I won’t put a lot of hope into this until I see further proof, but there is a spark there worth watching.
However, if my friends and family are any indication, the majority of people would rather leave their heads up their butts and pretend these things don’t happen and God forbid, they certainly don’t want to have to actually do anything about it.
Animal cruelty cases online spark outrage across nation
Experts say humans hardwired to respond strongly to victimization of most vulnerable
By Amy Husser, Canwest News Service August 14, 2009
It was three gun-toting men blasting away at defenceless ducklings in a roadside pond in Saskatchewan that recently raised the ire of the public when a video highlighting the escapade was posted on YouTube. Collectively, the men were punished with a$16,000 fine.
Just days later, three young boys in Newfoundland were accused of harassing a baby moose to the point of exhaustion. It had to be put down in front of horrified onlookers.
On the other side of the country, dead kittens were found in a freezer of a Nanaimo, BC, home where 94 sick and neglected cats had to be taken into the care of the SPCA. The shelters have been flooded with calls from people looking to adopt the cats.
The response has been nothing short of outrage.
“What makes someone do these things?” one reader asked on Canada.com.”Obviously, no respect for life. If they cannot respect animals, how are they going to treat fellow humans in the future?” “Those kids should be beat with sticks, maybe their parents, too,” said another.
“A $10,000 fine is not enough!! We should do like the East and cut off their hands!!!” another wrote on Canada.com.Animal cruelty is nothing new. The Ontario SPCA investigated 14,850 complaints last year alone, and more than half of the animals involved in those claims were taken in as a result. It’s no different across the country. The British Columbia SPCA conducted 4,647 cruelty investigations in 2007; Alberta looked at 2,056 cases in 2008.
But it is the public viewing of such events that evokes a strong response, experts say.
“When the killing of animals somehow is public or recorded in some way, we’re much more sympathetic,” said Sean Hawkins, a University of Toronto professor who studies the intersection of animal and human rights. “It can generate much more attention than if it happens behind the closed doors of an abattoir.”
Hawkins said the public’s emotional response can be “highly subjective,” and people tend to have more sympathy for individuated cases; atrocities performed against a single creature illicit more attention than collective animal cruelty, he said.
Hawkins said animals often become “icons” of human memory, explaining that the duck reminds us of our childhood bath toy and the moose “fits into our national mythology.”
“Research suggests that humans seem to be hardwired to be the most empathetic to the most vulnerable around us, and most enraged when someone victimizes the vulnerable, whether it be an animal or a person,” explained forensic BC psychologist Steve Porter in an e-mail interview.
“Most of us are incapable of harming others, including animals, in a premeditated way,” he added. “We can imagine what the animal might feel if we did so.”
Porter–a professor with the University of British Columbia-Okanagan and whose hometown is Deer Lake, NL, where the moose-beating incident took place–said animal cruelty can be motivated by curiosity, a sense of power or anger and revenge related to and often stemming from human relationships.
“Perpetrators of animal cruelty –whether young people or adults –almost always engage in other types of anti-social behaviour, sometimes including violence against others,” Porter said.
Currently, animal cruelty is prosecuted as a property crime or under Canada’s Wildlife Act, which Holland said makes criminal convictions difficult.
© Copyright (c) The Edmonton Journal
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