Calling All Flory Fans!
If you, like Flory Morales, have a photographic memory for just about anything you’ve seen or read; if you’d rather be researching and surfing the Web than wasting your time playing Clue; and if you can argue either side of a debate and still win your case … baby, this blog’s for you!
In January of 2007, University of Victoria professor Maneesha Deckha launched a course called “Animals, Culture and the Law,” to help students explore how our attitudes toward animals have shaped the ways they are protected under the law — or not. [See http://communications.uvic.ca/releases/tip.php?date=22012007]
Currently under Canadian law, animals are considered property. Yep, same as your lawnmower or your car. And that’s just “owned” animals, companions like your cat or dog, or livestock on a farm. Unowned animals, such as the harp seals hunted here by the millions every spring, experience even less protection under the law.
Our previous federal (Liberal) government was working toward amending cruelty-to-animal provisions within the Criminal Code so that animals would no longer be considered property. A change like that would have meant more charges laid, and more prosecutions, in cruelty cases involving animals. Score one for the animals … almost.
See, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative government scrapped the proposals, leaving animals with the same inadequate protections they’ve endured since the 1800s. Score one for the politicians, the lobbyists and the industrialists who make their money off the backs of animal suffering.
UVic joins Ryerson University in Toronto in training law students to examine the issues surrounding legal protection and rights for animals — issues that parallel those experienced by women and Native peoples through history. Law students with a grounding in these issues may work as animal rights lawyers, or as counsel with organizations dedicated to protecting animals and advancing their welfare. They may also find their way to the inside track, working as policy-makers to change the laws themselves … for the better.
Flory has yet to declare what type of law she wants to practise, but if she sticks close to Jane Ray, it’s likely animals will be part of the picture. As the girls head into their final year of high school in Gaia Wild, which I’m writing now, I’m thinking about what happens next — for Jane, for Amy, for Flory — after school, after graduation. If Flory heads over the water to Vancouver Island to study law at the University of Victoria, what happens to the intrepid threesome? To afternoons at the Shack? To animal rescue in Cedar’s Ridge?
What happens next?