Madam Speaker, again it is a question that is almost impossible to answer. What is cruelty?
I am not into this at all but I understand there are some people who experience pleasure in pain. There are special names for them, sadists and masochists. The line between pain and pleasure is really blurred there. Like I said, I am not into that at all but I can see where there would be a pretty lively debate on whether or not something is painful.
I grew up on a farm in Saskatchewan. Dad used to get us up early in the morning. When the sun came up, he would say “The Lord put the sun in the sky as a light for us to work. It would be a shame for us to waste it”. We got up early in the morning and worked until late at night. We were hot and sweaty and had chaff all over us. Someone who has never worked under those conditions just does not value a shower at all. There is nothing compared to the pleasure of a shower at the end of a day like that.
In a way it was painful. It was hard work. Sometimes we hurt at the end of the day from the physical exertion we had put out. Nowadays there is a lot more mechanization in farming. It was painful, yet it was pleasurable.
Of course the courts are going to have to rule on whether something is cruel to animals. As I said before, I have actually only been to a few rodeos in my life. The only one I wonder about is the calf roping. Sometimes it looks like they get jerked pretty good, yet I have never ever seen one having to be taken off in a truck. They always survive. They seem to be built for it.
My own opinion would be that most rodeos and circuses are well within the bounds of treating animals humanely. That is my own opinion. We need to keep it all in balance. As I said before, in all cases wilfully causing an animal pain is not permitted.
Just in passing, one more example is the training of animals, whether it be dogs or horses. Anyone who has ever done this knows it is done by a combination of reward and punishment. A small amount of pain is inflicted on the little dog who does his doody-doo where he is not supposed to do his doody-doo. Eventually he learns and becomes a trained dog, and we like him. As long as he does his thing all over the house, we do not like him. We all experience a bit of pain in that regard.