Thank you very much for your question.

There are, as I mentioned at the outset in my comments, definitely other weaknesses within the Criminal Code with regard to animal cruelty. Mr. Kaye mentioned having worked on trying to improve protection for police animals for a decade, and certainly many of us have been working for a significant amount of time to update the Criminal Code with regard to animals.

Specific for us, areas that we were working on hopefully are going to be dealt with in Bill C-35, which is the aggravating offence of maiming, injuring, killing or wounding a service animal. So it's good to see that's moving forward.

We also see a very large hole in the Criminal Code dealing with animal fighting. Right now there is on the books that it's illegal to be at a cockfight, for example, but it doesn't recognize the other types of fighting that have evolved over the last hundred years. It also doesn't recognize that you could be training an animal to fight and be committing acts of animal cruelty, and that it should be illegal to actually profit from animal fighting. The way the current Criminal Code is written is that you must be caught in the act of being at the fight.

As we will have seen in the past with say, as some of you may know, the very high-profile case of Michael Vick, he wasn't at the actual fight. He was charged with a felony, because he was the one who owned the training facility, and to train an animal to fight is an extraordinarily cruel process. That's one area that we see should be very easy for everyone to get behind, that animal fighting and animal cruelty that happens in animal fighting should be addressed in the Criminal Code more appropriately.

We would also like to see the term of “willful” be removed from “neglect.” I don't necessarily think it's the same case here the way willful is used, but “willful neglect”, to prove that someone intentionally did something and what was going on in their mind at the moment that they were neglecting an animal, has made it very difficult to move forward with the Criminal Code, so we see prosecutors across the country actually turning to provincial legislation in order to address this issue.

Why that's important, of course, as you will all appreciate, is that we need it to be charged under the federal law so that your criminal record follows you. As you might have recently noticed in the case with the Milk River dogs, a woman who was habitually neglecting animals to near death and moving from province to province was only being charged provincially, because of the concern that the federal law, the Criminal Code, would not be able to address the issue adequately.

We would also like to see that all animals are protected. Right now, as you probably know, cattle enjoy their own section of the Criminal Code, because when it was written a hundred years ago, cattle were the main animals that were of critical importance. We would like to see all animals have the protection of the Criminal Code in wording.

Finally, there's no specific offence for particularly brutal, violent, or vicious crimes against animals, and to our earlier conversation about the violence link, we think it's very important that we have an offence that addresses this issue that whether or not the animal dies immediately, if you kill an animal brutally or viciously, the chances are you will escalate to humans as well.

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