Wow. It’s time, – past time – for me to start re-thinking Quebec. In my last blog, I reported the good news that the province of Quebec – our largest province and second largest in population size (over 8,000,000, which is 23.2% of the country’s population; Ontario’s population is 13,400,000, 38.3% of the country’s population) – had decided against a plan to ban pit bulls and Rottweilers in favor of legislation that criminalizes the kind of human behavior that turns dogs nasty. Science triumphed over emotion.
On the heels of that great news, the administration of Montreal’s progressive mayor, Valérie Plante, announced a phase-out period to end the use of horses to pull calèches, horse-drawn carriages, now used mostly to show tourists around city streets. City streets have proven, again and again, to be no place for horses. We managed to get the practice banned in Toronto decades ago and, currently, the only working horses we see in Toronto’s streets are those maintained by the police, and they are given exceptionally good care; treatment that is made all the better by a plethora of cell phone cameras ready to record any abuse that occurs on public streets.
Montreal nearly banned calèches in 2016, when there was a horrific collision between a car and a calèche. That led to a one-year moratorium in the use of calèches in the city, but it was successfully challenged in court. Plante wisely has given fair notice to calèche drivers, thus eliminating grounds for a court challenge. The SPCA is helping to find homes for the horses as they are retired. Sadly, Victoria and Quebec City still have calèches, and they are also used in Stanley Park, Vancouver, where at least there is more shade and less city traffic than in the other locations. In the U.S. they are in many cities, including such tourist-magnets as New York City, Palm Beach, Santa Fe, and Las Vegas.
I say “rethinking” Quebec because, in the past, my colleagues and I have struggled with a lot of Quebec-based animal welfare issues. A major part of the infamous east coast commercial seal hunt occurs in the Magdalen Islands and along the Gulf’s North Shore, both part of Quebec. Montreal was a major center for fur auctions. Back in the 1980s thousands of caribou drowned when Quebec Hydro was too abrupt in releasing water behind dams and, just recently, the province declared it “too expensive” to protect a small herd of endangered caribou from going extinct and they are in denial about the bear poaching for bear galls smuggled to the nearby U.S. market. The province also has been notorious for its proliferation of puppy mills, but again Montreal has shown progressive attitudes by restricting pet store sales of dogs and cats to animals from shelters.
There is a welcome trajectory here toward more compassion for animals based on solid information and humane values.
Keep Wildlife in the Wild,
Barry