The InquIsITorIdeas Beyond the ClassroomApril 29 2014 Issue 6

Written by Julia Pappo

Commercial Animal Abuse in Canada

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In the past few weeks, information has been brought to light that one of Canada’s leading producers of commercial turkeys has been severely mistreating their animals, by keeping them in

deplorable conditions and using brutal methods of euthanasia to ‘destroy’ the birds. While it is no secret that animal rights in Cana-da are seriously undermined, and that in recent news large cases of animal abuse have been showing up increasingly throughout the country, the current situation faced by these creatures is un-surpassed in both numbers and brutality in our shameful history of commercial animal treatment.

According to the Ontario Society for the Prevention of Cru-elty to Animals Act (2009), every animal must be provided with adequate and appropriate medical attention and sanitary con-ditions, among other fundamental rights. Unfortunately, these rights were violated repeatedly by the Hybrid Turkey corpora-tion, whose production of turkeys amounts to roughly 60% of the 21 million turkeys slaughtered in Canada each year. Thanks to an undercover investigation of the Hybrid facility by a member of Mercy For Animals Canada, video footage of turkeys with raw open wounds (including rotting eyes and untreated infections) undergoing failed euthanizations have surfaced, which depict Hybrid employees clubbing, kicking, throwing, and leaving tur-keys to suffer for up to 10 minutes before death is finally granted to them. Not only do these animals have to suffer these sorts of unfair treatment, but they are also bred in a way that has ren-dered them abnormally large for their ages. This leaves them with deformities that sanction them unable to fight back, and are left at the mercy of their ill-advised handlers.

Although Hybrid representatives have called this an “isolat-ed incident” and state that their company has no tolerance for animal abuse, the circumstances beg to differ, and prompt the question: how poor is our country’s animal rights education that events like this are allowed to happen on a daily basis? And seeing as this is not the first of our country’s major commercial companies to be accused of animal cruelty, how much do Ca-nadian company’s care about the well being of their livestock? In 2012, the pork production company Puratone was found to house similar treatments, with pigs suffering from physical abuse and left with open sores, as well as pregnant pigs being confined to gestation crates so small they could not turn around or even lie down comfortably in them. Sadly, Canadian law does not prohibit the use of these specific treatments, and has thus been criticized, since European countries have had the same practices outlawed for the past 14 years.

In lieu of Hybrid’s present circumstance, the company is now being investigated–but is that enough? The company has stated they will be the first in North America to have mandatory video monitoring and veterinary reviews of all further euthanizations, but who’s to say they won’t revert back to their old ways? The–

– Jordan Yordanov

Graduating Out of CompetitionThose within the arts are no strangers to competition. Most, if not all students at my school – the Etobicoke School of the Arts - have at some point heard the phrase: “So who’s the best in your major?” On one hand, competition creates drive in order to improve one’s craft. On the other hand, competition implies that others are obstacles in your own success. Through my own experiences as a film major, the arts are a very collaborative undertaking. Most film sets need a Director, Cinematographer, actors, and so on. The other arts are no exception: a play needs cast and crew, a symphony needs a wide variety of different musicians and instruments, and a musical needs singers and dancers. Every art requires a cohesive effort, yet there is still so much compe-tition. Who is the best photographer, who is the best dancer, who is the best musician? How could the arts, which nearly always require cooperation, garner such competition? Sadly, this competition does not only stop at the arts.

ESA is unique in comparison to other schools. Most schools do not have such a heavy concentration of students in the arts, resulting in a lesser degree of competition - for how could you compete when there is no one to compete with? At these schools, the main source of compe-tition afflicting them originates from the classroom. As a grade 12 stu-dent, it is easy to realize that many of your peers will be applying to the same universities as you, and may even take a spot that could have been yours. This can be a quick ticket to resentment among students. You get the marks back for an assignment, and the person beside you scored 10% higher, so you might avoid helping others on the next assignment in fear of boosting their marks above yours. Before you know it, you’ve lost goodwill between students, and everyone is unwilling to help one another. Now, is this an extreme case? Perhaps, but that does not mean it’s any less possible; and even if it does not go as far as I described, any step away from student cooperation will hurt the school, and students themselves, as a whole.

I am not saying that all competition should be rooted out. It would be foolish to deny the motivation gained by pushing students to strive higher, but I urge teachers and students alike to focus on cooperation. The Examiner (an American news network) covered group studying, and their findings were as such: The University of California San Diego “analyzed 80,000 interactions between students in a collaborative learn-ing environment for college courses, and higher achievers were more likely to be the ones who formed strong connections with other students. Exchanging information and encouraging each other along the way.”

Time spent with your peers, who could help you understand the material, is infinitely more beneficial than studying alone and, as my math teacher puts it, “slamming your head against the desk”. It would not only be beneficial in terms of grades - it would build friendships, goodwill, and add to the enjoyment of the process. So next time there is a test, a project, a film, or a musical, help your fellow students to get closer to the best possible product. As an old proverb put it (borrowed by Akira Kurosawa in his 1985 film Ran); “a single arrow is easily bro-ken, but not three together”.

EDUCATION

War, poverty, slavery, corruption, greed; with such abhor-rent acts attributed to us, it’s easy to reason that humans have always acted this way, and that the horrors of our

existence are simply a by-product of our nature. Aspiring for any-thing better, some say, is beyond our genetic capabilities. The truth, however, is far less stark: our species, Homo sapiens, has existed for nearly 200,000 years, the vast majority of which was spent liv-ing in what anthropologist Richard Lee calls “small-scale kin based social groups, in which the core institutions of economic life included collective or common ownership of land and resources, generalized reciprocity in the distribution of food, and relatively egalitarian po-litical relations”. In reality, humans are known to be one of the most cooperative species in existence - as our age long history has prov-en. Think about it: when you lend your friend a hand, do you do it expecting financial compensation? More often than not, the answer is no. We do it because living in a world where such cooperative behavior didn’t exist would be a very dreary world indeed. What then, you may be wondering, went so wrong so that humanity was sent into a tailspin towards Armageddon? The answer for that today, as it was thousands of years ago, is the same: class division.

Though difficult to pinpoint, class division originates to a few thou-sand years ago, when a revolution in agriculture was taking place on Earth. New advanced methods of farming meant that certain indi-viduals and groups could now produce over and beyond what was needed for them to subsist – a surplus. Having created a surplus, many farmers were now freed from the toil of their previous manual labor; but the prevalence of droughts and famine meant that these same farmers were now required to organize the farm labour and make sure resources were stored at all costs – this led to the rise of the first “bosses”. The heavy-handed ordering of farmhands became commonplace, as did warfare between competing groups; all in the interest of preserving and enhancing farm production. As history pro-gressed, this hierarchy would evolve alongside the growth of cities and civilizations, leading to the concentration of surplus wealth in the hands of the few who possessed property of any sort – usually by virtue of inheritance. For many of them, retaining property and appropriating wealth was their “god-given” right, which justified the entrenchment of social inequality. Lacking the understanding of hu-man development we possess nowadays, it is really no wonder why these ideas of divine authority remained prevalent.

To this day, property relations have not only persisted, they have become more all-encompassing, absolute and entrenched into our lives. The possessing class of our epoch–the bourgeoisie –are so because they own the “means of production” (the factories, banks, farms, etc. which sustain our livelihood). They are sustained through profits, which are earned by selling the services and products which workers provide and create. The non-possessing class of our epoch

- the proletariat - are the wage-workers who are valued only in so far as they provide labor, and who sustain the bourgeois class. The proletariat grows by the day, as small business owners are continually deprived of their livelihood by the big corporations, driving them into the ranks of the working class. Though property owners could once argue that deprivation of their property would mean forfeiting the motor of development, this can be no longer argued in the modern era. Since the advent of the industrial revolution, resources are no longer as scant as they were thousands of years ago, and enough is produced to ensure that every hu-man being may live a comfortable life. The continued existence of class divisions has only ensured that such a lifestyle will not be equally shared by the population of Earth. Inequality does not result from a lack of resources, after all, but from an unequal distribution of those resources. To show this, consider the fact that, according to Oxfam, the richest 85 people own as much wealth as the poorest 3.5 billion - or half the world population! If this were not enough, the “rational” functioning of the irrational capitalist system leads to period economic crises (as recently as 2008, from which the recovery has been pathetic), as well as warfare between nations acting on behalf of the interests of big business (consider the 2003 US invasion of Iraq) – all things clumsily attributed to intrinsic human error nowadays. This is not a genetic problem, it’s a class problem.

If we are not bound by “human nature”, what then is our solution to the calam-ities of humankind? The answer is for the workers to seize the means of production, and create a democratically planned world economy where resources are allo-cated on a needs basis, and workers receive the full fruits of their labor. In other words, we must abolish the class system, and replace it with a classless society. In doing so, the economic basis for war and poverty will disappear, and humans will be able to face each other as real humans; not as the mere money relations that exist under capitalism. Call me an unabashed socialist idealist, but under an economic system where war has become the norm and millions are allowed to starve or die of easily curable diseases while a minority prospers, socialism is all we have left.

It’s Just Human Nature

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The InquisitorEditor-in-Chief: Marco LaGrottaDeputy Editor: Jordan YordanovGraphic Designer: Dylan VogelIf you have any questions, or would like to contribute to The Inquisitor, please send an e-mail to Marco LaGrotta at marcolagrotta@yahoo.ca

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quality of life for so many animals is too important to leave to trust on the word of a company that has covered their real actions so much before. And not only is it the welfare of the current turkeys at stake, but also that of those to come. Does anyone really want to support a company that allows its animals to be dealt with so severely? It is for the sake of the whole future of Canadian com-mercial farming that animal rights laws need to be tightened, as well as for that of domestic animals as well. After all, if the animals being eaten in Canada are given this kind of treatment, what sort of example does it set for people with animals at home? Not a very good one, if you ask me. Iq

EDITORIAL

STUDENTS IN REVOLT

Newfoundland and Labrador - In what is being called “a momen-tous victory for students”, Newfoundland and Labrador has become the first province which is set to replace its student loan system with needs-based grants. National Chairperson of the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS) Jessica McCormick notes that “the victory in New-foundland and Labrador is a result of years of consistent lobbying and mobilization”, also expressing her hope that “other provincial govern-ments will now follow the lead of [Newfoundland] and take immediate action to make post-secondary education more affordable.” Unlike any other province, all post-secondary students in Newfoundland are CFS members.

Education is a Right ... If You’re a Newfoundlander