jane goodall

And Trudeau's new legislation won't stop any of this, according to U of T adjunct law professor and litigator Lesli Bisgould.

The new legislation is an update of legislation originally enacted in 1892 to ensure humane practices. Bisgould says the laws haven't been strengthened much in the past 127 years -- even though the family farm, where animals grazed in open pastures, has largely been replaced by today's industrial farms, where animals are confined in cramped quarters, with pigs and cows often chained in crates and cages too small for them to even turn around.

Typically, these animals experience the outdoors for the first time -- often after years of confinement -- as they're loaded onto trucks bound for the slaughterhouse.

"With increasingly mechanized operations hurriedly processing 700 million animals every year, the notion of humane practices becomes absurd," observes Bisgould in her powerful book Animals and the Law.

The failure of our legal system to keep pace with the new reality of farming is at odds with the considerable evolution that's taken place in popular attitudes toward animals.

While animals were historically seen as creatures with little resemblance to humans, modern scientists, starting with Charles Darwin, have identified a much closer connection between humans and higher animals. Darwin observed that the difference is "one of degree not of kind."

According to the eminent anthropologist Jane Goodall: "Farm animals feel pleasure and sadness, excitement and resentment, depression, fear and pain. They are far more aware and intelligent than we ever imagined."

Of course, animals can't talk, compose piano concertos, or understand the laws of thermodynamics.

To their credit, however, they lack some of the worst traits found in humans -- deceitfulness, cruelty, greed, sexual treachery. It's hard to imagine an animal version of Jeffrey Epstein or Donald Trump.

Certainly the dividing line between humans and animals isn't as clear as once believed. Yet the legal divide remains vast -- on one side, humans enjoy extensive legal protections covering all aspects of our lives. On the other side, animals have virtually no protections, even against the infliction of extreme pain.

It's hard to see much of a moral justification for this vast difference, beyond the fact that we make the rules.

In recent years, concern about animals has become something of a hot-button issue among progressives. And the Trudeau government clearly wants to be seen to be in sync with this wave -- even as it leaves utterly unprotected hundreds of millions of animals trapped in horrendous conditions inside the secretive world of factory farming.