Some 40-odd years ago, I was seated in a soft arm chair in a high-end hotel at the corner of Avenue Road and Bloor Street, Toronto. I had draped my winter coat over the back of my chair as I sat awaiting the person whom I had agreed to wait for prior to going to a meeting in one of the hotel’s meeting rooms. As she arrived and we decided to go, I lifted my coat and it seemed to snag on something. I pulled it free and grabbed what was stuck to the sleeve, which was quickly stuck to my hand as I tried to free my coat. It was a type of so-called “glue trap,” essentially a piece of cardboard coated in glue, with a bait designed to catch, and hold, mice, who subsequently die of stress, if not starvation, suffocation, or thirst.
I immediately flashed back to the early 1960s, when my mother, Phyllis E. MacKay – a pioneer in what is now called wildlife rehabilitation – had received just such a trap with a chipping sparrow hopelessly mired on it. I was in my teens but I recall the painstaking effort required to free the delicate toes, the desperate search via telephone calls in those pre-computer-search days to find a harmless solvent, and the need to clip away at feathers as the tiny bird grew ever weaker. He survived, but needed extensive care for many months and to wait for plumage to grow back before he could be released.
Yes, I complained bitterly to the hotel, having to take some effort to convince them my concern was not the cleaning bill for my coat, but the sheer barbarity of the device, and no, I never returned to that establishment, but also had no more success convincing them to not use these horrible things than I’ve had getting stores to stop selling them, and I’m not alone in that within the animal protection movement.
Thus my delight, last week, to learn that an organization called Canadians for Animal Protection is taking to the courts to sue some of Canada’s biggest retailers selling glue traps – Canadian Tire, Home Hardware, Lowes, Walmart, and Home Depot – on the grounds that the stores are promoting what is illegal under the Criminal Code of Canada, which, inadequate and antiquated though it is, does prohibit “unnecessary” cruelty to animals.
However, criminal law is supposedly enforced by government, not the civil courts, so the first hurdle is to successfully challenge the big retailers’ assertion that Canadians for Animal Protection have undertaken an “abuse of process.” Their route was chosen because of the unlikelihood of any federal or provincial government in Canada ever enforcing anti-cruelty laws on behalf of mice – or chipping sparrows, for that matter.
However, last week, Canadians for Animal Protection essentially won the first round of their legal battle, against enormous odds, by having the judge agree to consider the application, with a decision expected mid-summer.
Keep Wildlife in the Wild,
Barry
