Barbaric animal torture case in Mississauga exposes Ontario’s broken system

It’s a case that has stunned advocates, residents and criminal justice authorities. 

A press release from Peel Regional Police described it as “disturbing”. Donna Power, co-founder of the Humane Initiative, a prominent animal rights advocacy group in Ontario, labelled it “horrific”. 

For three months, Peel Police were finding dead and mutilated bodies of 8 to 10-week old puppies in parks and other public spaces in Mississauga. 

Four dogs were found. One was dead; the others had clearly been tortured, suffering “severe mutilations to their tongues and noses”, police reported. 

Investigators now have evidence of as many as eight puppies allegedly tortured by one person. 

In mid-April police arrested and charged 43-year-old Jiong Wang with four counts each of causing unnecessary suffering to animals; killing or injuring animals and cruelty to animals. The charges have not been proven in court.

It has left many people wondering how one person was able to obtain as many as eight different puppies, torture them, and dispose of them in public places, without being caught earlier.

As shocking as the details are, many advocates within the animal rights sector are not surprised. They have been warning for years that crimes go undeterred by the current system. 

Buying and selling animals in Ontario is a largely unregulated market of online sellers and websites that allow puppy mills to flourish and bad actors to harm animals with little concern of being detected. 

“I guarantee you there is already someone else out there already doing this. We only found this guy, and he only got caught and charged because he was dumping puppies in a public place,” Camille Labchuk, the executive director of Animal Justice, says. “This was foreseeable from many many miles away. If you wanted to design a system to give predators easy access to animals you could not come up with a better system than unlicensed breeding and free, online marketplace.”

A simple search for “puppies” on Kijiji returns hundreds of ads for dogs being sold all across Ontario. 

In 2024, the PC government introduced the Preventing Unethical Puppy Sales Act—known as the PUPS Act—claiming it would be the legislation to finally shut down the puppy milling industry thriving across much of Ontario. But the PC law fell far short of creating any strong barriers for puppy mills, and failed to put in place easily enforceable standards for holding bad actors accountable in the rare instances when charges are actually laid.

The legislation was lauded earlier this year when two individuals pleaded guilty to four offences under the Provincial Animal Welfare Services Act (PAWS), the enabling legislation for the PUPS Act. But advocates say this was only a drop in the bucket, and the government still has no method for determining the true scale of the problem in the province, with no reliable statistics on the number of puppy mills currently operating. There is nothing in the legislation that will help identify them.

This anonymity allows puppy mills to carry out their business online without any checks and balances in place. In this environment, a bad actor can commit crimes with impunity. 

“This is a crime that is challenging to detect because the victims can’t speak for themselves and they can’t report abuses. So it’s all the more important that we have systems set up to try and prevent this abuse from occurring in the first place,” Labchuk says.

Throughout the drafting of the PUPS Act, advocates were demanding the government create a licensing system for breeders. 

Currently there is no requirement for anyone who wants to breed dogs to register with any agency or authority. While there are a patchwork of municipal licensing regimes that require registration and inspection of the space being used for the operation, this has proven to be ineffective at keeping animals safe from harm. 

A province-wide licensing system that requires breeders to register would not only give the government a better idea of how many people are operating in Ontario, it would also help limit the type of barbaric crime Peel Police just investigated. 

“Without the licensing system in place, everything in the PUPS Act is moot, if you don’t know where these bad actors are, nothing else matters,” Power, with the Humane Initiative, says. “It’s all for show…They are unwilling to make the investments in identifying and regulating these breeders.”

The majority of puppies today are sold through websites like Kijiji or other online marketplaces. Deals are done in cash, often in set locations away from the farm or backyard breeding location. This not only allows bad operations to remain hidden, but perpetrators looking to commit similar offenses can do so basically uninhibited. 

The lack of a licensing system also gives the person purchasing the dog few options for accountability should the dog they just purchased for $1,000 suddenly fall ill.

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, puppy milling and backyard breeding exploded across Ontario as people stuck indoors during lockdowns sparked unprecedented demand as many tried to fill all the extra time with a pet companion. Many advocates and pet care professionals attribute this demand with an uptick in parvo cases—an often fatal disease that infects puppies and can spread quickly.

 All charges related to animal cruelty in Ontario 2019-2023.

(Statistics Canada) 

Despite the possibility for a license system to fill many of the existing gaps in Ontario’s system, the PC government has refused to consider it.

“We just have seen very little appetite to do even the most basic oversight in Canada, let alone something that is a bit more comprehensive like this,” Labchuk says. 

This unwillingness by the government to take legislative action comes as animal cruelty charges are on the rise across Ontario. Between 2022 and 2023, charges laid by police—which does not include provincial offence charges laid by Animal Welfare Service inspectors—increased from 89 to 256, a 188 percent spike.

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