No, it was mother duck. She said to her children “We had better wiggle our tails and get out of here”. With that they put it in hypergear and away they went. I was able to move over to the shoulder to give them a little space. The truck behind me did not have to do that. All their little lives were spared.
That of course is the object. What we are dealing with in the criminal code is people who do not have a built-in care and compassion for life, whether it is animal life or human life. That is what the criminal code is about. If all of us cared about each other, we would not need the criminal code. We would not need a codification of what happens if a person beats someone up, if someone is brutally assaulted or killed. We would not need those codes because people would not do it. Obviously the purpose of the law is to restrain those who do not have that built-in moral code and who would act on their own accord wilfully against other forms of life.
I will digress for a second. One of the definitions is that an animal is, according to these amendments, to be defined as a vertebrate or any animal that can feel pain. I guess we have a bit of a question there. One of the things I remember doing when I was a youngster is going fishing with my dad. I do not do it any more now. I do not have any time and I have lost interest in it. Many people either make their livelihood by fishing or do sport fishing.
I remember when I was a youngster we went down to a little lake south of the place where we lived. Every once in a while my dad would reward us for working hard on the farm. He would say “Tomorrow we will take a day off and go fishing”. The first thing we did was go out to the garden and dig up some worms. I remember it well. The object was to have a little pail of live worms in dirt, and off we went to the lake.
I hope you do not mind my relating this story, Madam Speaker. It is rather gruesome.
When we got to the lake, we put those poor little live worms on the hook. We impaled them on the hook. I do now know whether the poor little worms are animals capable of feeling pain. I did not hear any of them scream, but I have never heard a worm scream in any case. I do remember that the tail wiggled when we impaled the head end on the hook so maybe there was a response to pain. We know that a worm is not a vertebrate, but it is an animal that can probably feel pain. According to the definitions in the bill, the question is, should a person who goes fishing be charged with cruelty to earthworms?
Speaking of earthworms, I remember that when I was a biology student in high school and university we dissected worms and frogs. We all did that. It is part of learning how the physiology works. We took them apart to see their different parts and to learn about the different bodily functions. We all know that medical students do this extensively in order to become good at what they are to do, which is to help us when we have an illness or injury.
Is that a cruelty? I can imagine some people saying it is pretty cruel to anesthetize a frog into oblivion so that it can be used as a research tool. Let us go one step further. How about the animals that are used in live research? Monkeys are used to duplicate some of the illnesses that befall human beings to see whether various treatments work on them. Rats and guinea pigs are used, as are other animals. Is that cruel or is it not?
Certainly we do not support being wilfully cruel to an animal, but to use an animal for legitimate scientific and medical research surely cannot be wrong. It is an advantage to us in the human realm. By taking out the word wilfully we have opened up a large question. Even with the word wilfully one could have argued that perhaps this was cruelty but now it makes it worse. We should not be getting into the area of making it more difficult for people to do legitimate scientific research even though there are arguments to be made for treating these animals very humanely, as humanely as possible. I agree with that because it is not always humane.
When I see the phrase that the animal is one that can perceive pain, I am reluctant to give this example, but I think I must. We have that very sad case in Canada that a human is not considered a human until it is fully born. One really needs to ask whether in late term abortions of human beings, that unborn human, one minute before it is naturally born, is capable of perceiving pain. In my opinion, there is no cover in our criminal code against that criminal offence any longer. That is perhaps an error that is of considerable consequence.
Madam Speaker, you have given me the signal that my time is up. I am certainly not finished talking about this topic. There are many other areas to discuss but I close by appealing to the Liberal government to change the way it works in committees. I appeal to the government to give careful thought to and actually assent to the amendments we will be bringing forward to correct some of these anomalies. Doing that would make the legislative process work so much better on behalf of Canadians.