The Guelph Humane Society is thrilled with the changes the province’s new animal welfare will bring.
Earlier this year the Ontario Society for the Prevention and Cruelty to Animals announced that it will not enforce cruelty provisions after June 28.
The GHS, along with other humane societies across the province, were given the authority to enforce the law through Bill 117 until the province came up with a new animal welfare system that was officially released yesterday.
Board member of the GHS, Dr. Shane Bateman said the province has taken the appropriate steps to listen to the people across the province and address a number of outstanding deficiencies in the previous legislation by improving penalties and investigating and prosecuting cruelty and neglect.
“They’ve done an excellent job in stepping up in those areas and now making that work much easier,” said Bateman.
Earlier this year, nearly 17,000 people responded to a public survey across the province to address how animal welfare in Ontario can be improved to enforce in the new animal welfare system.
The proposed Provincial Animal Welfare Services (PAWS) act will introduce new offences to combat activities such as dog fighting, give inspectors necessary powers to help animals in distress, hold owners accountable, give the government the ability to take action when an animal is in imminent risk, improve oversight and ensure transparency, significantly increase penalities, and establish a multi-disciplinary advisory table made up of a wide range of experts.
The system also intends to be strengthened by hiring a larger number of provincial inspectors to allow for greater coverage across the province by including specialists in livestock, agriculture, horses, zoos and aquariums.
Bateman said this initiative will allow a broad and appropriate coverage for the entire province.
“So that’s also an excellent move forward and ensures that animals in the entire province are receiving the same level of attention and care,” said Batman.
In a press release, parliamentary assistant Christine Hogarth said that the PAWS act will introduce the strongest penalties in Canada for offenders and make Ontario the first jurisdiction in Canada to implement a full provincial government based animal welfare enforcement model.
“I think one of the greatest frustration I think that any person or organization who is working in animal protection can experience is the agony of going through an intensive investigation, going through the prosecution and then you know the sentence or the outcome of that not necessarily being reflected in what we all expect or appreciate to be our community standard,” said Bateman.
Guelph Humane Society executive director Adrienne McBride said that one of the crucially important pieces in the new legislation is the recognition that psychological distress can be just as harmful to animals as physical distress.
“A lot of times we can repair the physical damage, we can rehabilitate or augment the broken legs and things like that but often we can also see the psychological damage that we need to repair in these animals so I’m glad there will be some prosection around that,” said McBride.
“In the past, we’ve seen some just really atrocious and upsetting cases like someone getting a $50 fine and that doesn’t recognize the significance that science is telling us and our experience is telling us that when someone is abusing an animal they have a lot of potential to do harm to humans as well,” said McBride.
She said that taking animal welfare seriously is really a step in the direction of taking everybody’s welfare seriously.
Because the legislation is still very new, McBride said the GHS is still in the process of evaluating and understanding the new legislature.
“For us, we’ve always said that the most important thing in all of this is that animals are protected. How they’re protected and who protects them, those are questions that need to be answered, but at the end of the day what matters is that animals in the province of Ontario are protected and they have good legislation that makes that happen,” said McBride.
“That’s what we’re focusing on when we’re reading the legislation.”
