Vancouver Sun columnist Pete McMartin published an article today questioning if emotional abuse of animals be considered harmful even if there is no physical harm. Pete quotes Rebecca Ledger, an animal behaviourist, university lecturer and animal welfare columnist for The Sun, who has supplied testimony establishing emotional abuse in the animals involved. “I believe we are the first people in Canada to apply behavioural evidence in these kinds of cases and to infer emotional suffering based on behavioural evidence,” Ledger said. “I think the reason it’s taken up until now for these kinds of charges to be laid and accepted was that people were always concerned that we might be anthropomorphizing, because we can’t ask animals directly how they feel. But just like us, they can communicate in other ways. They can react to a negative situation with a physiological stress response, for example. And that physiological response is measurable. So we can measure things like cortisone levels, heart rate, pupil dilation, respiration rate … But one area it might have an impact, she said, will be on animals in zoos and aquariums. “The fact that they’re there as part of conservation practices, and that these (practices) are used to justify why they’re there at all, there’s substantial amounts of behavioural evidence and physiological evidence that indicate those animals suffer. So is that justified?” Can she see this being used as a challenge against aquariums and zoos in the future? “Absolutely. It’s only a matter of time.”