Hope Bridgewater of Wentworth (July 30 letter) writes in defence of the dog Brindi, whom HRM appears determined to kill: "It is easier to stand by and say nothing, but my conscience compels me to ask HRM to drop the charges, to allow Ms. Rogier to take Brindi home after his long stay at the SPCA shelter and, in compensation, to pay Ms. Rogier’s legal bills."
As a resident and taxpayer of HRM who has followed this story from the outset, I concur — and for precisely the reason expressed so eloquently by Mahatma Gandhi in the quotation that opened Ms. Bridgewater’s letter, and which bears repeating as I close this one: "The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated."
Norm Sabowitz, Halifax
There was also a letter of interest regarding the treatment of animals in Canada, and seals in particular:
Don’t be fooled
Canadians must not be fooled by our politicians’ bizarre insistence that the seal hunt is humane, though they purport to justify it by scientific evidence. Science may say that the animals die painlessly, but to look to veterinarians for an ethical justification of the seals’ killing is to shoulder their science with a burden it is not meant to bear.
That a seal dies painlessly is not enough: We must consider that seals, and many other animals, are evidently conscious, feeling beings capable of taking joy in their lives and in their relationships with other animals. They avoid harm because they desire to continue living. When a seal is killed, a member of a community has been destroyed, and a willing, feeling soul has been deprived of all its hopes — it has died when it wanted to live.
Seals are not a special case, since animal abuse is rampant throughout Canada and the world: The ending of the Canadian seal hunt, accompanied as it must be by measures to ease seal hunters into new employment, is only one step of many that must be taken.
John MacCormick, Bible Hill
