Reporters shouldn’t be penalized for doing their job, and neither should well-intended people who can’t turn a blind eye to animal abuse.

But new legislation tabled at Queen’s Park would punish journalists and citizens for revealing abusive and neglectful farm practices by imposing huge fines for trespassing on farms and livestock operations.

My friend Tom Walkom and Star contributor Jessica Scott-Reid have recently written about the Security from Trespass and Protecting Food Safety Act, which could result in fines from $15,000 to $25,000 for trespassing to expose abuse on farms and slaughterhouses.

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Their reporting reminded me of columns I did a decade ago about a farm on Ma Brown’s Road near Port Perry, where Jack the Donkey endured abuse until he lit out for the homes of neighbours to get away from his owner.

I was stopped at a traffic light in the area when I spotted a poster on a pole, asking people to keep an eye out for a runaway donkey named Jack. You don’t see that too often. Since we shared the same name and designation as a donkey, I called the number on the poster.

The posters weren’t put up by Jack’s owner but by concerned neighbours who hadn’t seen the friendly donkey — which would often flee to their houses from its owner, who beat him with a switch — in many weeks.

And then they got to talking about the farm, where the owner — an absentee farmer who lived in an apartment in Toronto — raised sheep for an illegal meat operation.

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They described a situation where a herd of sheep suffered for years from chronic hoof rot, while the owner hid bones and carcasses from his butchering operation under wood piles and in shallow graves on the farm.

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Come see for yourself, they said, leading me on a guided tour that revealed the extent of the problems. They knew their way around the property, having trespassed many times to figure out what was going on.

A water well in the barn was so fouled by dung that it was declared a biohazard by the Environment Ministry. The farmer still used it to water the sheep. Much of the barn floor was four feet deep in sheep dung that hadn’t been mucked out in many years.

My questions inevitably led to the Ontario Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (OSPCA) for Durham Region, which had issued many compliance orders to the owner but did almost nothing to enforce them.

When pressed, the OSPCA either avoided answering me or offered dodgy replies. At one point, its spokesperson said it could be good for sheep to live in a barn that was waist-deep in poop, because it would keep them warm, even though it had issued orders that the barn be mucked out.

The takeaway was that the OSPCA had neither the will nor the resources to enforce provincial rules on livestock cruelty. The situation was resolved only after the farm owner was deported. And Jack the Donkey was never seen again.

Walkom and Scott-Reid both made the point that the proposed legislation would offer a smokescreen to bad operators by turning whistleblowers into offenders. But there are other reasons to be concerned.

Agencies that enforce animal neglect laws have always been chronically underfunded and expected to do their job without the necessary resources to be effective. Only government can change that.

But if whistleblowers and journalists face huge fines that will dissuade many from doing the right thing, it’ll reduce the number of abuse complaints that the OSPCA would have to investigate.

It lets the OSPCA off the hook and lessens the need for the province to provide the funding needed to effectively enforce animal protection laws. It turns things upside down; the good guys are now the bad guys.

Anyone who thinks it is wrong should stand up and be counted by letting the Doug Ford government know that they oppose it.