Canada: Gruesome video shows cow slaughtered outside Milton mosque

Not just England where large animals are dismembered in a London back garden, and sheep are stolen and their innards dumped in a country lane. Not just France where sheep are found crammed ready for sacrifice in the garage of a pizza resturant. Also Canada, a town in the Toronto area.

From the Toronto Sun

WARNING: The video linked to in this story contains graphic content!

On Friday, my Toronto Sun colleague Farzana Hassan made a plea asking Canadian Muslims to phase out the practice of animal sacrifice as an offering to God after the annual Hajj to celebrate Eid al-Adha every year.

However, her plea of sanity to Muslim Canadians to abandon the tradition of slaughtering animals and simply donating the equivalent money to charity, may have fallen on deaf ears.

The very next day a resident of Milton, Ont., went live on Facebook showing himself skinning a cow that was hung face down from the blades of a forklift. The man gave a running commentary about his cow cutting prowess, boasting that within half an hour the cow would be cut up into pieces.

The animal’s head appears to move, though the forklift it was suspended from is also moving, but it is not clear whether the animal was still alive during the skinning an certainly animal rights group and others have raised that concern.

No sooner had the video gone on Facebook Live that people reacted in outrage, denouncing what seemed like animal slaughter in a backyard. Within the hour, the video was deleted but not before it was downloaded.

The scene was grotesque and seemed to be in the backyard of a home in Milton, but Police determined it was outside an under-construction mosque.

Ontario’s Agriculture ministry has launched an investigation into the slaughter, with Minister Ernie Hardeman calling the video “disgusting and gruesome.”

“There is absolutely no tolerance for this sort of treatment of animals in our province or in our backyards,” Hardeman said. “The Ministry has been speaking with investigative bodies regarding the incident, and will have more to say following the results of the investigation.”

Halton Regional Police have now been asked by the City of Milton to investigate the slaughter of the cow …

Halton Police’s Sgt. Dana Nicholas told me, “With regards to the slaughtered cow in Milton, I can confirm that we have received a complaint from the Town of Milton staff requesting we look into animal cruelty.” Sgt. Nicholas confirmed the “video is believed to have taken place around the Muslim holiday of Eid” but clarified that the location was not a home backyard, but in a temporary mosque in Milton.

. . . another police official told the Sun an officer “very familiar with farming operations” was handling the investigation and believed the cow “was clearly dead and was in the early stages of being butchered.”

When I inquired how Halton Police had come to the determination that the animal was not slaughtered in a cruel manner, and who made that call, the butcher or the health department of the city, Sgt. Nicholas wrote back: “I have no other information regarding this occurrence.”