Tag: Canadian politics

Camille Labchuck

Executive director of AnimalJustice.

“We’ve got this obligation to animals as a society to try to help them if we can.”

“Canada hadn’t passed any serious new animal protection legislation since the eighteen hundreds. That’s pretty shocking to most people.”

“We’ve got this obligation to animals as a society to try to help them if we can.”

“We never would have come this far, and people never would have known about the industry, if not for Rob Stewart’s Sharkwater film in the first place. I mean, I don’t know about you, but that was definitely the first time that I was exposed to the idea that shark finning existed, and I think it’s what mobilized a lot of people to take action.”

“The problem Mark, is that animals are victims of crime. They can’t report abuse themselves. They can’t speak up for themselves if there’s no one around to listen. And they’re often isolated and kept behind closed doors by abusers and it’s very, very difficult for anyone to know or detect what’s going on.”

“I think the problem is that governments seem to think these days that their role is to protect businesses, their roles are to protect industry — and if some other aspect of our laws, including endangered species laws, it’s inconvenient. To that end, they’re happy just to disregard it.”

“It’s in the economic interests of many humans to keep animals in the position that they are right now and not elevate them to some other sort of status that has rights. So there’s no moral argument for it, and there’s no scientific argument. There really is only an economic argument and I don’t think that’s good enough to deny an entire class of billions and trillions of beings  basic fundamental rights and freedoms, like living in appropriate social groups, like having access to fresh air and water and life.”

“A lot of people say that we need to protect animals because they’re voiceless and we need to speak for them, and I think that’s a mistake too. I think it’s really clear that animals do have voices and they use them. They use them to tell us that they don’t like what they’re doing to us. Every time we see a calf escape a slaughter truck, every time we see a coyote try to gnaw his or her paw off to escape a leg hold trap, when they yell and they scream when they’re being sent to slaughter, they’re telling us that they don’t like what we’re doing to them. So I think it’s important to grant them that agency and recognize that they have voices. We just ignore it and silence those voices.”