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As Hassan wrote, “Before meeting their fate, the sacrificial animals are bedecked, bejeweled and indulged in every way possible. … The most disturbing aspect of this tradition is that children are encouraged to develop an affection for the animal — and then often forced to witness its slaughter.”

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.

A copy was sent to me, which I shared on Twitter. 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.”