A Call To Mercy

The legalized annual seal slaughter in the Gulf of St Lawrence and around Newfoundland has this year been set by the Canadian government at 275,000 harp seals, out of a herd of more than 5.5 million, as well as 8,200 out of 600,000 hooded seals. Canada's commercial seal cull by fishermen--who harvest the creatures for their pelts, blubber and meat--is the world's largest hunt for marine mammals. Sealers and the fisheries department defend the hunt as sustainable and well-managed, and say it provides supplemental income for isolated fishing communities that have been hurt by the decline in cod stocks.

Much of the protest against the hunt has focused on methods used to kill the seals--killed either with a spiked club, or haakpik, or a rifle. Groups like Greenpeace have filmed seals being skinned while still alive. This year, hunters will take an extra step to make sure the seals are dead before skinning them. Hunters will be required to sever the arteries under a seal's flippers, a recommendation made in a European Union report released in December.

Believe me, I wear no rose colored glasses. As I type these words, amazingly inhumane practices are business as usual in slaughterhouses all across the USA. There are brutalities in animal management that play out daily in everything from poultry to beef factories. It was just a few months ago that we were privy to images of a worker on a forklift ramming a sick cow during the last beef recall. The industrial meat production world needs to clean-up its act as well. But perhaps the seal hunt provides a lens to reflect on our treatment of animals--something which we've somehow managed to insulate ourselves from.

And the brutality is a big part of my issue with the seal hunt. It's not the sustainable harvest of a species for food that I find unacceptable (though I think that argument is a canard), it's the method of dispatching them and the potential suffering these animals endure that's hard to stomach. The hunt should not just be sustainable, it should be humane. Clubbed, shot, and bled to death before skinning just doesn't strike me as meeting that call. And what's it all for? Claims that seal meat is feeding multitudes of indigenous Canadians practicing centuries-old traditions just doesn't hold water. According to Matthew Scully in Dominion, the real spoil of the hunt is fur that is sold to international furriers for luxury coats. The remainder, mostly leather scraps, are used for gloves, briefcases, wallets. The penises of adult seals are sold to Asian markets, where they are ground and used as aphrodisiacs. This product line justifies such brutality? We're not curing cancer with the hunt, so let's stop pretending like it's utterly indispensable.

I think it's fair to wager that a seal is at least as intelligent as a dog. I don't see one catching a Frisbee anytime soon, but from what I've seen of trained seals in captivity some can certainly do a lot more than Fido. They demonstrate curiosity, can learn, and form complex social bonds. No decent human would want to see their pet dog suffer. The thought is almost painful. Why, then, should we be so inured to the suffering of another similarly intelligent animal? Is it because the suffering is silent and out of sight?

I know I run the risk of getting tagged as some sort of extremist seal-hugger with this post, but I feel HOW we choose to hunt is as important to consider in sustainability as WHAT we choose to hunt. And while kindness to animals may not be our most important duty as human beings, it should certainly not be treated as our least important. Clubs with skull-piercing metal hooks that often don't kill immediately is humane and the best we can do? And "tradition" should trump our humanity and compassion?

Sorry, my cultural relativism has limits.