Selective outrage and animal cruelty

A Winnipeg couple has been charged and sentenced for heinous acts of animal cruelty that took place in a Lord Roberts-area apartment in 2024.

Irene Lima and Chad Kabecz were sentenced earlier this month to 12 years in prison for torturing and killing small animals including kittens, hamsters and a frog, in so-called “crush” videos and photos posted online.

Reaction to the case has been as expected.

Animal-lovers countrywide and beyond have expressed anger, disgust and horror over the abuse, and mixed emotions about the sentencing. Taking to social media, many demand the couple be held longer behind bars, while others call for street justice.

The vast majority of Canadians believe that mistreating and killing of animals is unacceptable, immoral and wrong. Canadian law also recognizes animal abuse as illegal.

Under Manitoba’s Animal Care Act, “No person shall cause an animal to be in distress.” Distress can mean injured, abused or neglected, or not provided food, water or shelter. And the Canadian Criminal Code makes it an offence to: “Wilfully cause, or being the owner wilfully permit to be caused, unnecessary pain, suffering or injury to an animal.”

However, in both cases there are exemptions for animal farming. Of course you can’t get bacon from a pig without injuring them. So when we talk about unacceptable animal harm, we don’t mean in the food system.

And yet, within animal farming there are some permitted practices that aren’t all that different from the horrific acts committed in that Winnipeg apartment.

For example, under the National Farm Animal Care Council codes of practice, an accepted method for “humanely euthanizing” baby pigs is “by grasping the hind legs of the piglet and striking the top of the cranium firmly and deliberately against a flat, hard surface.” This is also known as “piglet thumping,” and footage obtained by animal advocates shows that it simply means slamming the heads of live piglets into the ground until they die.

Lima and Kabecz allegedly had a price list for the animals they would crush and kill. According to that alleged list shared online, to see a baby chick killed would cost US$40. It’s horrific to imagine paying to have a small defenceless animal killed so violently on your behalf.

And yet, when we purchase eggs, we aren’t doing much different.

The egg industry routinely kills billions of baby chicks — those born male, because they can’t lay eggs and are of no “use.” A common method for doing this is by grinding them up alive in mechanical macerators — or giant blenders.

Sounds more like dark web content than wholesome breakfast food, doesn’t it?

So why do so many of us recoil with disgust when learning about cases of egregious animal cruelty, yet remain largely indifferent to the systemic suffering of pigs, chickens and other animals raised for food?

Social psychologist Dr. Melanie Joy explores this in her book Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows. She explains that humans have a deep capacity for empathy, but we are shaped by an invisible cultural belief system she calls carnism: the idea that killing certain animals for food is normal, natural and necessary — thus it becomes acceptable.

Carnism teaches us to see certain animals as individuals worthy of protection — such as our pets — but to see farmed animals as mere commodities, property, food.

Generally, when animal cruelty is made apparent our empathy is triggered.

We rightfully feel shock, outrage, distress — like in the case of Lima and Kabecz.

But when that suffering is normalized, assumed to be inevitable, and hidden away on factory farms and in slaughterhouses, our cultural conditioning allows us to just look the other way.

We continue to buy our bacon and eggs without ever confronting our hypocrisy, without ever confronting the violence embedded in the supply chains that we financially support. We’ve been fooled by that cultural conditioning, as well as by industry marketing, to believe that what goes on inside factory farms and slaughterhouses is somehow different from what went on inside that apartment.

It’s not.

Jessica Scott-Reid is a Winnipeg-based journalist and animal advocate. She is also a correspondent for Sentient Media, and a member of the Winnipeg Humane Society’s Animal Protection Committee.