Updates from May, 2011 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts

  • 10:23 on 2011/05/14 Permalink | Reply  

    Some of the access roads to the Champlain bridge will be closed all weekend and the bridge itself will be partly shut down for repairs.

    Andy Riga has some stuff about the new A25 bridge to Laval, set to open to pedestrians today and to motorists next Friday. He’s got more links and details in his blog, where he asks whether the toll model for this bridge will be used for the new Champlain, with a poll. (I’m just wondering whether it will continue to be called the A25 bridge, or be given a more interesting name eventually.)

     

  • 09:59 on 2011/05/14 Permalink | Reply  

    In response to problems with Berger Blanc, the city’s proposing bringing in some more laws controlling animals on its territory. I think the real situation is messier than these proposed ideas can deal with.

    Sterilizing strays works in places with no harsh winters, but what would be the point of operating on an animal and then tossing it back on the street in our climate? Even supposing it could scrounge and survive for awhile, what’s it going to do in wintertime?

    We may have to register our pets but we may need to show they’ve been sterilized. I have an older female cat who was originally a stray. She was sterilized before I adopted her, which I found out at the time, but I have no papers to prove it. Does this mean I’ll need to visit the vet and get a certificate? How silly could this get?

    Unfortunately, we’re trying to change society’s ethics with laws, and that’s always difficult to do. We need to somehow make people realize that adopting an animal isn’t something you do on a whim – you should be prepared to look after it for its lifetime or, failing that, find someone who will. Given that dogs live from 8 to 15 years and cats these days can reach 20, it’s not a trivial thing to undertake.

    Anyway, the city’s promising better oversight of Berger Blanc (more details on that on Openfile). The city has also decided to study opening a public pound, which it badly needs.

    I could take Openfile a tiny bit more seriously if it didn’t have things like “Reported on le vendredi, mai 13, 2011″ on it.

     

    • Chris 12:12 on 2011/05/14 Permalink

      It can indeed be hard to change society’s views… In our consumerist society, most everything is a disposable commodity, even animals. We breed them for sale and profit. We kill them, serve them on our plate, don’t even finish our meal, and toss the leftovers in landfill. By comparison, “freeing” a pet you’re bored with back into the “wild” is pretty charitable!

      It seems to me requiring all dogs and cats to be neutered *before they are sold* would help matters a great deal.

      For the inevitable abandoned pets, is there no market for dog and cat meat as food? We already feed ground up farm animals to other farm animals, couldn’t euthanized strays be used for this purpose too? It could help recoup operating costs.

      As Ghandi said, “The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.

    • Kate 13:50 on 2011/05/14 Permalink

      I don’t think it’s a fruitful line of argument to confuse food animals and pet animals. Yes, I understand your point, we’re all animals, it’s arbitrary, but you know perfectly well nobody is going to eat cats or dogs and, even if they would, no politician would dare suggest such a thing. Beyond this, the animals we eat are herbivores (or should be) and we rarely eat fellow carnivores for various good reasons.

      As for sterilization before sale, not all pet animals are sold. Many are given away or adopted casually. In any case, it’s debatable whether it’s healthy for animals to be spayed or castrated too young, although it happens often enough.

    • Chris 19:06 on 2011/05/14 Permalink

      Kate, I agree. (note: please reread, I was not suggesting *humans* consume pet meat! ick.) My greater point was about the outlook of our society wrt to animals in general. You spoke of changing society’s ethics. Why not get a pet on a whim? You can just abandon it after. Why not? It’s not worse than how we treat other animals. In my view, these are absolutely connected, ethically speaking.

    • Kate 09:18 on 2011/05/15 Permalink

      You seem to be saying that while we eat meat, that means we can’t treat cats, dogs or other companion animals decently? I don’t think that follows. People live alongside these animals, whereas most urban people are at more than arm’s length from the animals we eat. I think it takes a good deal more denial to abandon or hurt a pet one has looked after than to eat bacon for breakfast.

      Re your proposal to use cats and dogs for fodder, we know that we should not be feeding meat to animals who are naturally herbivorous – this is why it’s worth getting organically produced meat or meat that’s been grass-fed. People should eat less but better quality meat. Prion diseases suck.

      Anyway, my cat has to eat meat, which blurs the whole ethical thing a little.

    • Chris 11:20 on 2011/05/15 Permalink

      Almost. Not that we meat eaters “can’t” treat other animals better, but that it’s just one leap of “denial” (as you say) more, rather than 2 leaps more. If a large proportion of the population believed that killing animals to eat (an activity required for survival) was wrong, then it would be a large leap for them to kill/abandon pets just because they are bored of them. Conversely, if one is already comfortable killing them for one reason, abandoning/euthanizing boring pets is a smaller leap. In your 4th paragraph you spoke of it being hard to change society’s ethics, I’m arguing the change is doubly hard because our starting point is two leaps of denial away from where we want to be. I hope this is clearer.

    • qatzelok 14:21 on 2011/05/16 Permalink

      Non-vegetarian pet-owners: “I treat my love-slave very well, but the hamburger on my plate spent his entire life in a cardboard box.” Is this because you are only supposed to be nice to the animals that you capture and enslave?

    • Kate 18:41 on 2011/05/16 Permalink

      qatzelok: We did not enslave cats or dogs. Their relationship with us is a millennia-old compromise between species, as each of them saw advantages in associating with us and vice versa.

      The gradual mutual selection took awhile: wilder dogs would stay away, ones with a genetic tendency to fear humans less would approach and warm themselves by a fire and feast on bones and scraps thrown to them by hunter-gatherers, who soon saw the advantage of having a few strong dogs around the place. Now dogs like people, because over their generations they either chose to join us or chose to stay away, and the ones who hung around interbred and humans selected the ones that were most malleable.

      Cats took longer. It wasn’t till people were doing regular agriculture and storing grain that our mouse and rat problem became a bonanza for the sand cats in the Middle East, who then began hanging around human settlements for the opportunity of catching the well-fed rodents that also lived there, and for the protection humans afforded them from bigger predators.

      In both cases the animals who chose to live with us are living far longer than their wild counterparts, at the expense of surrendering some freedom. But that’s pretty much what human civilization also did to us.

      If you think people went into the forest and stole handfuls of wildcat kittens or wolfish pups and tried to force them to stay on their farms or in their encampments, you don’t know much about cats and dogs.

      As for food animals, we eat them because yes, we are the apex predator, and we’re on this planet, and we survive off what else is here. We are not different from nature. We are nature, and in nature, creatures live off each other. What is there that says we should be excluded from this?

      In any case, I refuse to buy the implications set out here that we can’t be kind to stray animals if we eat meat. Quebec has the worst record in North America for putting down unwanted pet animals, and that’s an issue we need to fix. As far as I’m aware, we don’t eat more meat than people in any other North American jurisdiction. Let’s not get the two issues tangled up uselessly, because that way it tends toward the argument “if we can’t be vegetarian, there’s no point in proceeding with this issue, and we know the majority won’t turn vegetarian, so let’s give up now.”

  • 09:43 on 2011/05/14 Permalink | Reply  

    Montreal’s crime stats fell 7.3% in 2010 against 2009, continuing a trend in the decline of crime here generally. An exception was an increase in homicides (37 vs. 31).

     

    • Freeloader 10:17 on 2011/05/14 Permalink

      And the murder rate is up considerably already this year from last.

    • Kate 10:26 on 2011/05/14 Permalink

      True, but there’s always going to be some variation, and I’ve seen no indication there’s a wave of criminality afoot that accounts for this year’s uptick.

    • ant6n 11:23 on 2011/05/14 Permalink

      Maybe the cops just make it harder to report crime? Or is that too cynical?

    • Kate 13:51 on 2011/05/14 Permalink

      Possibly – stats can be tweaked all kinds of ways – but I have a feeling that’s not the reason.

  • 09:07 on 2011/05/14 Permalink | Reply  

    Sarah Gilbert gives us an interesting profile of Billy Mavreas, presiding wizard of gallery and gallimaufry Monastiraki.

     

  • 08:26 on 2011/05/14 Permalink | Reply  

    The little known Bois de Saraguay on the north edge of the island is to be developed into a park, but let’s hope it’s done with a light hand.

     

    • Freeloader 10:17 on 2011/05/14 Permalink

      That’s where the sniper came through to shoot Rizzuto, of course.

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