Sad Day for BC

Don't you hate it when something horrible happens close to where you live, or where you are from? There's this sense of shame that your hometown was the setting of a heinous act and that people will associate you with it when they learn where you're from.

I'm from BC which has a fairly large population given the fact that Vancouver and Victoria are large cities, so it's understandable that the chances of bad things happening there are more likely than PEI since the population here is so small. Some prime examples of terrible BC events are the discovery of Robert Pickton, the lovely pig farmer who killed dozens of prostitutes and fed them to his pigs. That story made everyone think twice before eating bacon for a while. Then there's the controversial Creston BC which holds about a thousand people involved in Canada's largest polygamy community. Nothing like giving your 12 year old daughters over to men old enough to be their grandfathers to make BC look good! Honestly though, why does a man feel the need to have 26 wives and 80 children?

The reason I bring up this strange topic is that today while watching the news, I was horrified to see the story about the employee of a dog-sled company in Whistler BC who slaughtered dozens of sled-dogs. So the business was set up to give tourists dog-sled rides during the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver and now, apparently the business isn't doing well so they decided to kill the dogs since they were of no longer of any use to them. The more I think about this the more upset it makes me. There dogs are magnificent creatures and I am quite certain that all they had to do was pack them up in a truck and bring them to shelter or somewhere, anywhere, that would take the dogs and find good homes for them. But instead they decided to have one man slowly kill the dogs, right in front of the entire 100+ tethered pack of dogs, and toss them into a mass grave where they were left to die (if not already dead.) Many of the dogs were already sick and abused due to neglect and lack of resources to properly care for them. Shouldn't this have been a sign to reduce your numbers before it got to this point? Adopt them out to homes who can take them!



I feel sick typing this. If you sit down and read up on the story you'll understand the magnitude of what actually occurred at this place and be just as sickened as I am.

As of right now in Canada, if you commit a serious animal cruelty fine then you can face up to 6 months-5 years in jail and have a lifetime ban of owning any animals. I wonder if this would be 5 years per animal? So many people in the world are not animal people and many think that 5 years for hurting an animal is a bit much. But why is hurting an animal any worse than hurting a young child? Both rely on us for their survival and trust us completely. Am I really talking apples and oranges here people? In my opinion, I don't think so. The thing that sucks about animal cruelty cases is that many of the people are released from jail early, probably because they seem like low-profile cases or something. This saddens me very much.

Our license plates say "Beautiful British Columbia" and it's hard to think of Whistler right now without the vision of the mass murder of these dogs. I know that this kind of thing can happen anywhere in the world, but it's just unforunate that it has to happen in my amazingly gorgeous home province. For a long time now whenever people hear "Whistler BC" they'll be saying, "Oh, isn't that where all of those dogs were killed?" Sucks to be remembered for something like that.