While a handful of people may cling to the idea that animals are just brainless automatons, the scientific evidence is all but conclusive: We're all animals -- humans happen to be the most clever -- and animals, in varying albeit often primitive ways, have emotional lives.

People react to this news in varying ways. Some forswear eating meat or become advocates for improved animal welfare. Others join animal rights groups and try to argue that all lives, mouse or human, are equally valuable (few of us take that extreme position). But one would hope that even the most devoted carnivores among us would regard animals as beings worthy of kind treatment.

Apparently that's not the case. How else to explain the incidents of horrific animal abuse that periodically splash sensationally across the front pages of newspapers or spill out of our television screens? A dog dragged to death behind a car. A horse starving to death in a muddy field. A wild animal shot with an arrow for no other purpose than to amuse a sadist.

It's good to see provincial and federal governments increasing prohibitions against animal cruelty. But it's taken far too long, the loopholes are broad, and the penalties are still too meager. It's time to extend our sphere of concern -- not to give animals the rights of humans, but to recognise the profound difference between an iPod and a cat; between objects and lives. Animals are property, sure, but pet or food animal, they're a special kind of property, deserving of special treatment. And wild animals belong to all of us. A crime against a Canada goose is a crime against our community.