Scarborough Unfair

A Scarborough homeowner who spent 10 years cultivating a native plant garden of more than 150 species says Toronto bylaw officers went well beyond their authority by chopping it down without warning last week. Deborah Dale returned home from work last Tuesday evening to find the plants removed from in front of her home.

"I called the police because my garden had been vandalized. It's not the first time I've had plants stolen, but to have the entire garden been taken away ... After 10 years it's not funny in the least," said Ms. Dale, a former president of the North American Native Plant Society.

City officials confirmed yesterday they were responsible for removing the garden, which was on both Ms. Dale's property and on the city-owned boulevard, saying they had received complaints that the garden had become unruly and offensive. The cost, about $200, will be added to her property taxes.

The Toronto Municipal Code requires all lawns to be kept trimmed to 20 centimetres or less. Natural gardens, those of free grown plants native to the area, are exempt. But Bill Blakes, the area’s manager of municipal licensing and standards, said the city rarely issues such exemptions. In Scarborough, he issues about 12 a year.

Ms. Dale said the city had no right to deem her property an eyesore simply because they didn’t recognize the plants she was growing.

"The city not only destroyed flowering plants and plants that were setting seed for use by the North American Native Plant Society in their fundraising efforts, but they also removed shrubs, a red oak tree, and even the sign indicating that it was a natural, pesticide-free garden," she wrote in an e-mail. She listed Cardinal Flowers that attracted hummingbirds and Butterfly Milkweed — finally in full bloom after years of growth — as some of the casualties.

A 2003 complaint about her garden was dismissed, Ms. Dale said. On June 26, the city received a new complaint. She received an infraction notice the next week, she said.

"I know the neighbours complain. I've complained about them, they’ve been hacking at my hedge. The city can't do anything about that. Apparently they can do something like enter private property and destroy my garden," Ms. Dale said.

Mr. Blakes said the city responds to complaints about unruly gardens and lawns with an "advisory letter", and then a second warning before sending in the mowers. Ms. Dale said she's filing a grievance against the city to recoup the cost of her garden, approximately $10,000.

"That’s 10 years of work. I don't have the time or the money to put back into recreating that garden from scratch. It took years, and it took a lot of courage. When you have a blank slate like that, just digging the first hole and knowing you're going to be doing something a little different that not everyone is going to understand, it's very difficult.”

Meanwhile, Ms. Dale is still upset at the loss of her personal nature project. "The city hasn't responded to my complaints about this. They haven't even acknowledged they’ve done it. I explained to the bylaw officer again that it's a native plant garden and it's exempt from any bylaws. There are no weeds at all in the garden. I invited them to come out and look at it. And that’s the last I’d ever heard."

Pet lovers call for tougher cruelty laws

When Toronto Humane Society investigator Tre Smith learned this week that his licence had been temporarily suspended, pending review of an ugly confrontation with the owner of a dog whose life Mr. Smith had just saved, the incident underlined a murky no-man's-land familiar to non-police law-enforcement officials.

And with Canada's archaic animal-cruelty laws poised to leapfrog from the 19th century to the 21st, the altercation provides a snapshot of difficulties looming for the men and women who enforce those laws.

Nowhere more so than in Ontario, whose animal-welfare regulations are by every estimate the weakest in the country. The industrial and financial heart of the country is also behind most states in the US.

That could change. Provincial politicians of all stripes, including the governing Liberals, appear certain to raise animal rights in the election campaign this fall. A further sign of the times: A workshop at the Law Society of Upper Canada, a first, will examine the law and animal rights.

But the big change is likely to be in Ottawa, where two competing pieces of legislation are currently before the House of Commons. Both would amend the federal Criminal Code to make cruelty to domestic animals an indictable offence rather than a summary one.

And while tougher animal-cruelty laws are decades overdue in the view of Hugh Coghill, chief inspector for the Ontario Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, he wonders how the province's more than 170 investigators can be expected to deal with offenders facing years in a penitentiary, rather than a small fine or - rarely - a brief spell behind bars.

"Indictable offences are arrestable offences," Mr. Coghill said.

"That means an SPCA officer would theoretically have to arrest the individual, take him or her to the police station to be fingerprinted, photographed and entered into CPIC [Canadian Police Information Centre, the national database that records criminal charges and convictions].

"Well, we don't provide handcuffs or handguns or nightsticks to our officers, and we don't provide them with the training to arrest people. Nor does any SPCA or humane society across Canada."

Laws in effect since 1892 decree that a Canadian can inflict on a pet the worst kind of suffering imaginable and incur no more than six months in jail, a $2,000 fine and a maximum two-year ban on owning animals.

Two bills are now before the Commons. One is Bill C-373, tabled by Liberal MP Mark Holland, which has passed its first reading and, along with severely toughening sanctions for abusing animals, aims to redefine them as sentient beings rather than objects.

The other initiative - Bill S-213, from Liberal Senator John Bryden - doesn't go that far, and in the view of its critics would still leave gaping loopholes in the law. But because it has the Harper government's backing and has now passed both the Senate and second reading in the Commons, Bill S-213 may be the one that takes effect.

Even with the way things are, he said, laying criminal charges for animal cruelty - 385 were laid province-wide last year - is expensive and cumbersome.

"The OSPCA act only gives us the power to write orders, it's ineffective and it's outdated," said Tre Smith.

"We'd like to see the federal laws toughened but also the provincial ones so we can hit [miscreants] in the pocketbook right away."

Even when orders are issued, one in four are contested via the Animal Care Review Board, a quasi-judicial government-appointed referee.

The society's files bulge with numbers. Each year, more than 1,000 investigations are launched citywide, and each year most perpetrators receive no more than a warning. In the first quarter of this year, the society was able to lay just four criminal charges.

Our laws protect anyone who wants to abuse an animal.

Source: Timothy Appleby, The Globe and Mail, August 11, 2007

What Can You Do?

Tell the Ontario government and Premier McGuinty that tougher animal cruelty laws are long overdue.

Sign the petition.

Tre Smith - Animal Hero

He did what he could to save man's best friend, but now Tre Smith, a Toronto Humane Society inspector, is in the dog house.

On July 31, Smith was alerted to a Rottweiler named Cyrus trapped in a sealed and roasting car during a blistering heat wave, with internal temperatures approaching 70C. With the creature near death, he broke the window, sending the owner out to answer his car alarm. With a choice between letting the dog die and hanging on to a man accused of animal cruelty, Smith made a difficult decision. He handcuffed the man to his car and left him there to tend to Cyrus.

"He (the suspect) was threatening and abusive and for my own safety and for the safety of the other people around me and for the safety of Cyrus, I needed to tend to Cyrus to save his life," Smith explained.

By the time police arrived, the captive man was bleeding, having been allegedly attacked by angry bystanders who witnessed the incident. "The police hadn't got here just yet but they were almost here, and I had to leave because the dog was non-responsive, had stopped breathing and I had to stimulate the dog just to bring him back," he recalled then. "So I had to leave for the life of the dog."

But that decision has now cost Smith dearly. The Ontario SPCA suspended his agent's license pending an internal review. He can still work at the Humane Society, but cannot investigate animal cruelty cases. The OSPCA fully supports Officer Smith's actions to save Cyrus, but the ensuing assault on the abuser could be problematic for the humane organizations.

By contrast, the accused, Paul Soderholm, who will appear in court in September and who is now listed on a North American animal abuse database, faces a maximum penalty under Ontario's antiquated animal cruelty laws, of $2,000 and 6 months in jail - a mere slap on the wrist.

While cruelty charges have been laid against the owner, there's a terrible irony in the fact that the man accused of the crime could one day get his animal back. It's an old dilemma Smith faces every day in his difficult but rewarding job. Soderholm claims to have rescued Cyrus as an abused puppy five years ago, and "would never do anything to harm him". Whoops! Short memory here! He just wants his beloved pet back. We assume he would be reimbursing the Toronto Humane Society for the $10,000 in veterinary fees to save the dog (in addition to the costs of replacing his beloved car window), but then, we'd rather see Cyrus in a loving home elsewhere. Lucky for him our laws are so gutless; otherwise, he could be liable for, say, $10,000 in fines and a real jail term.

"[The laws are] not tough enough," Officer Smith makes clear. "They don't have any teeth. We're gumming our way through this thing. How can anyone expect us to do our job properly if we don't have the tools, the resources and the laws and the people to back us up?"

"There is an avenue that he can proceed with to try and get his animal back in the meantime before this is seen before the courts." He is referring to the province's Animal Care Review Board which, last fall, returned two dalmatian puppies to their abuser in the Toronto Beaches. The Board's decision was subsequently reversed, and those puppies are happily in new homes. That story is here.

Smith recalls that the province was looking at toughening up the laws, but when the Legislature broke for the election, the new rules still hadn't passed - and won't until after the vote in October.

The good news is that, although Cyrus was near death and facing possible brain damage as a result of his ordeal, he is making a full recovery at the Toronto Humane Society. The friendly and alert rottweiler has already received over many offers of adoption. A Facebook group supporting Officer Smith has over 4,000 members.

In the meantime, the dogfight between the OSPCA and the Toronto Humane Society continues. The OSPCA rightly asked for timely paperwork in this contentious case, especially since the perp was taken into custody by being cuffed to his car. With 20:20 hindsight, we would all have done this differently, wouldn't we? And there is no question that Toronto Humane Society is milking this for all it's worth, and Officer Smith is their poster boy. After all, the 170+ animal cruelty inspectors in Ontario do this work every day.

The silver lining related to Officer Smith's tough decision is a groundswell of anger on the part of the public, and the awareness of the urgent need for more relevant animal cruelty legislation. The current legislation dates from the 1800s, and sadly supports abusers better than it does their victims. Most states in the US are way ahead of the industrial and financial heart of Canada, which is roughly on par with Mississippi. Bringing the anti-cruelty legislation into the 21st century is something that both the OSPCA and Toronto Humane Society can agree on.

City News video

What Can You Do?

Email the Toronto Humane Society and let Tre Smith know what you think.

Contact the Toronto Humane Society

Write to the OSPCA to offer your support for animal cruelty legislation that really has teeth.

Contact the OSPCA

Write to Monte Kwinter, Ontario Minister of Community Safety and Correctional Services. He has been working with a task force to put tighter legislation in place. Let's make this a priority in Ontario.

Contact Monte Kwinter

Tre Smith image is copyright Toronto Humane Society.

The Dark View of Charles Simic

Not a peep out of you now
After the bedlam early this morning.
Are you begging pardon of me
Hidden up there among the leaves,
Or are your brains momentarily overtaxed?

You savvy a few things I don't:
The overlooked sunflower seed worth a holler;
The traffic of cats in the yard;
Strangers leaving the widow's house,
Tieless and wearing crooked grins.

Or have you got wind of the world's news?
Some new horror I haven't heard about yet?
Which one of you was so bold as to warn me,
Our sweet setup is in danger?

Kids are playing soldiers down the road,
Pointing their rifles and playing dead.
Little birdies, are you sneaking wary looks
In the thick foliage as you hear me say this?

---

Charles Simic, a Serbian-American writer who juxtaposes dark imagery with ironic humor, was named the U.S.'s 15th poet laureate by the Librarian of Congress in 2007.He began to make a name for himself in the early to mid 1970s as a literary minimalist, writing terse, imagistic poems which, like those of William Blake, have their roots in observed objects that serve to extrapolate the universe.

Over the years, Simic's style has come to be considered immediately recognizable. Critics have often referred to Simic poems as "tightly constructed Chinese puzzle boxes." Simic himself has stated: "Words make love on the page like flies in the summer heat and the poet is only the bemused spectator." The quote intimates Simic's philosophy that true art must be greater than the person who created it.

"I am especially touched and honored to be selected because I am an immigrant boy who didn't speak English until I was 15," responded Simic after being named Poet Laureate.

“I’m sort of the product of history; Hitler and Stalin were my travel agents,” he said. “If they weren’t around, I probably would have stayed on the same street where I was born. My family, like millions of others, had to pack up and go, so that has always interested me tremendously: human tragedy and human vileness and stupidity.

His first full-length collection of poems, What the Grass Says, was published the following year. Since then he has published more than sixty books in the U.S. and abroad, twenty titles of his own poetry among them, including That Little Something, My Noiseless Entourage; Selected Poems: 1963-2003, for which he received the 2005 International Griffin Poetry Prize; The Voice at 3:00 AM; Night Picnic; The Book of Gods and Devils; and Jackstraws , which was named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times.

His other books of poetry include Walking the Black Cat, which was a finalist for the National Book Award; A Wedding in Hell; Hotel Insomnia; The World Doesn't End: Prose Poems , for which he received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry; and Unending Blues.

NY Times Review