I’ve been seeing this ad all over my frequently visited environmental sites. When you click on it, it directs you to stopthesealhunt.org. Where you are asked to add your voice to those advocating against the seal hunt because 98% of the seals killed last year were between 2 weeks and 3 months old.
I’m a little torn.
On one side of the issue - the seal hunt isn’t a bad thing. When done properly the seal will feel virtually nothing, as studies by the Canadian Veterinary Medical Association have shown, and studies by Americans in the early 70’s came to the same conclusion. The clubbing of baby seals is just as humane, if not more humane than the practices you’ll see done on farms that pack chickens into tiny rooms, let pigs rot in their own filth and never let cows see the light of day. However some people are stupid and they don’t use the equipment right and they don’t follow procedure. So not only do the animals get clobbered inappropriately they are sometimes skinned alive, which probably isn’t fun for them.
And don’t even try the “well do animals really feel pain? does their pain matter because they can’t talk?” if you kick a baby seal in the head, it’s probably going to run away from you because it hurt, so under that basic assumption when you start ripping its skin off while its dangling in the air - it will probably hurt it. But at the same time, I hate it when activists watch these videos of amateur and use them to invoke emotion on an uniformed public. They will show a little baby seal wobbling around by an idiot, followed by a professional blow to the skull with a hakapik and spout it all as cruelty when really, the blow to the head would have caused an immediate unconsciousness and death.
The ecological argument that they’re using is just flat out wrong. The seal population is well over 4.5 million animals which is 3xs as many seals as there were in the 70s. Canada’s seal hunt allows for the quota of 325 000 seals… not a huge dent to the seal population - but far more than the natives are allowed to kill in their cultural and lifestyle practices.
Fact of the matter is the seal hunt brings in well over 15 million dollars to the Canadian economy. It is the main income for most Aboriginals and thousands of fisherman. We have successfully depleted the cod fisheries leaving the Newfies with not a whole lot of other options besides seal harvesting. At least the Canadian government has gained control over the seal hunt before it got out of hand like the cod fisheries did.
It is not a detrimental hunt to the environment, it is beneficial for the economy, it is the main source of money, food and resources for the aboriginals and can be done in a completely humane way. The last thing that we need to be doing is to be preventing aboriginals for doing even more of their cultural activities in the name of selfish western superiority and ideology. My only protest against it are the idiots who don’t know how to kill properly and end up putting the seals through a lot of unnecessary suffering.
There are ways to conduct seal hunting appropriately - like being informed on how to actually use a hakapik, ensuring that the animal is dead before skinning it and obviously shooting a seal for death, not just to wound it. Not to mention that the Canadian government should be taking responsibility of the seal hunt instead of just leaving it as is. It is obvious to everyone who knows about it that when the sealers are released for the seal hunt they don’t give a shit if they’re killing the seals properly because it’s a race against all other sealers. There’s no time to drain the blood and ensure the animal is actually dead. If the seal hunt were conducted in a more reasonable fashion these sorts of mess ups could be avoided.
