The annual Seal Hunt

Seeing McCartney on CNN being such a sanctimonious prick made me want to make this thread. Nice to see someone else did.

A friend of mine made a very, very good post about the seal hunt on another message board. I'll have to quote it later, since he phrased everything much better than I can. For now, I can tell you that the general sentiment here in Newfoundland is "insulted" right about now. It probably says something when the reaction of a province of 500,000 people to a visit from Paul McCartney is pretty much just a collective eye-roll at his "ZOMG TEH CUTE WIDDLE BABY SEALS!!!" crap. Cuteness is a pretty sorry criteria to judge which animals you get indignant about people killing and which you don't.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

That's a whole issue all by itself, Jerrica. I'm kinda swamped with work tonight (damn you, honours thesis!), but I'll see if I can throw out a few random points for you.

No, you don't have to love seal killing to be a Newfoundlander. But this issue is so rarely about seals, for either side of the debate. For people like the McCartneys, it's about gettig photo ops with cute animals that are killed out in the wild, which they somehow think deserves their indignation more than the treatment of animals raised in 4x4 pens in slaughterhouses on a steady diet of growth hormones.

For Newfoundlanders, it's about a lot of things. Yes, some people make a healthy chunk of their annual income from it. Yes, there's the tradition aspect of it. Yes, it's taking a long time for alternative industries to crop up here, for whatever reason you want to blame it on. But I think it goes deeper than that. I think a lot of people are just damn fucking TIRED of being demeaned, stepped on, and controlled by mainlanders and outsiders, no matter what the issue.

Think about China for a second. When the communists first took power, Mao Zedong made a speech that contained the line "China has stood up." And that's a big part of the reason they don't like being told what to do by uppity western powers today, even on issues like human rights. It's the same "How DARE those foreigners tell us what to do?!" attitude. After being controlled for centuries by a Manchurian dynasty, then by a dozen different foreign powers who snapped up chunks of their country and treated them like crap for a hundred years, then going through a few decades with a corrupt Guomindong pseudo-government not doing a damn thing as Japan invaded... After all that, they finally get a government who, from their point of view, makes sure China is going to stand up for itself on the world stage.

Now think about Newfoundland. It seems like we have some of that persecution complex going on ourselves, but we haven't ever truly "stood up". Between fish merchants, the French and English tugging us back and forth, then back under British control, then Canada... There seems to be a real sense that mainlanders and foreigners have never done jack fucking squat for us. Is that irrational? Maybe. But it makes a lot of Newfoundlanders fiercely, fiercely resistant to people from away waltzing in and trying to tell us what to do when it comes to something a lot of people see (rightly or wrongly) as a part of our culture. It doesn't help matters when groups like PETA and people like Paul McCartney lie, manipulate, and hypocratise their way into making us look like an entire province of bloodthirsty monsters, and so many people just eat it up without looking at any side of the issue beyond "BABY SEALS ARE CUTE AND NEWFIES ARE MONSTERS FOR KILLING THEM".

As much as I hate to agree with anything ol' Danny says, he did make at least one good point on that CNN debate: no one's going to fight for the rights and futures of poor Newfoundlanders with the same tenacity that they fight to protect a bunch of baby seals. People will throw money at the IFAW and PETA to save a few doe-eyed, no-longer-clubbed whitecoats who make them go "Awwww! How can those horrible Newfies club something that cute?". They don't give a shit about poor kids in an outport whose families will lose a third of their yearly income. They don't give a shit about how hard people have to fight just to be able to make a living here doing ANYTHING. They don't give a shit about all the people who are forced to move away and wander to Alberta looking for work. Bottom line, people care more about holier-than-thou celebrities cuddling seals than about any of the people living in Newfoundland. So is it really surprising that so many people here DO have a "How dare these goddamn celebrities tell us what to do?" attitude about the issue?

Whether that attitude is justified or not is another matter. But personally, I don't find it the least bit surprising that so many people here would think that way.

(Wow, that went on a lot longer and more rambly than I thought it would.)

EDIT: Fixed a typo, added a tiny bit of clarification on a line that was kinda vague.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Originally Posted by JackyBoy

http://www.stopthesealhunt.ca/site/p...PFIqE&b=437937
Here's several recent short films shot by IFAW which document the seal hunt during 2004 and 2005. Footage from this year I think it says will be added soon. It's impossible for me to understand how anyone can support seal culling.

Dear Lord. Crap like this is exactly why I have no respect for groups like PETA and the IFAW. Sappy music? Check. Making sealers out to be monsters? Check. Shots of frolicking whitecoats? Check. Little argument presented beyond "SEALS ARE CUTE SO HAY DON'T KILL THEM!!!1"? Check. Incidentally, it kills me that one of the video diaries has the protesters freaking out because sealers are "attacking" them. (Guys? You're wandering around in a dangerous environment doing everything you can to get in the way, harrass the sealers, and make them look like monsters. What do you expect, a fucking welcome wagon?)

So there's video footage. So what? Give me time and I can probably track down some footage of what goes on inside a slaughterhouse or fur farm. Yet somehow, animals spending their entire lives in a giant factory-farm assembly line to be caged, mutilated, fed grotesque amounts of growth hormones, and killed en masse behind closed doors... That gets played up as less horrific than wild animals killed in the open, mainly because some sanctimonious animal rights group or another can film it and single it out for shame among their target audience. Which seems to consist mainly of people who will scream about all the animal cruelty that us evil bloodthirsty Canadians are apparently perpetrating without thinking twice about where their hamburger comes from, let alone bothering to look at any other part of the sealing issue beyond "seals = cute". Blood on the ice once a year sells a cause better than blood on a slaughterhouse floor 24/7, I guess.

To paraphrase someone else: whack-a-seal for a few weeks once a year seems a far cry better than seals spending their whole lives caged, hormoned up, and miserable in factory farms.

Arg. I could ramble, but my friend summed it up better than I can anyway. *cuts and pastes from here*

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Anti-seal hunters make me angrier than almost anything, for several reasons:

1.) Animal rights groups have been caught several times paying poor locals to stage brutal seal clubbings on film. In reality, any such brutal practices were abandoned literally decades ago. What goes on on the ice floes now is no worse than what happens in any abbatoir anywhere in the world --- in fact, you could argue it is even more humane, the only difference is that happens in the open air, and not behind closed doors. But to the world, we're bloodthirsty butchers, thanks to those immoral and false smear campaigns. For example, the first website claims that 40% of seals are skinned alive, whereas a proper reputable scientific journal (the Canadian Vetrinary Journal) found that seals are killed properly and humanely 98% of the time. Animal rights groups continually use pictures of cute l'il whitecoats, even though the killing of whitecoats was outlawed 19 years ago.

2.) The seal hunters come from one of the most economically disadvantaged regions of North America, where unemployment is not only in double digits, but sometimes tops 50%, and where economic opportunities are practically nil, especially since the closure of the cod fishery 14 years ago. They have been hunting seals to help get them through the harsh winter for generations --- almost 200 years commercially, and sometimes more than 400 all told. The seal hunt is both an important tradition to this culture and an important means of economic survival.

3.) Seals are in no way endangered, and in fact their large numbers are not helpful to an ecosystem in danger. There are currently more than 6 million seals in the waters around Newfoundland alone. That's about 12 seals for every one person.

Because of both domestic and foreign overfishing for decades, the northern cod is just about extinct in those waters. The first website is right --- seals did NOT cause this collapse. Such claims are ludicrous. People caused it. However, the cod fishery was closed down in 1992 to allow the stocks to recover. In 14 years of zero fishing, no recovery has happened. As to why this is, everyone is stumped, but some Marine Biologists say that the overwhelming seal population (3 times what it was in the 1970s) is a likely factor in this.

4.) Animal rights groups organized a boycott of Canadian seafood products last summer in protest of the seal hunt. Many of the restaurants that signed on board served foie gras. The sheer hypocrisy and ignorance of so many people on the "OMG STOP THE SEALHUNT!!!" bandwagon gets my blood boiling. Protest against factory farms, protest against comestics testing on animals, protest to save animals whose survival as a species is in question. The seal hunt should be nowhere near the top of the list of priorities.

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Here's a proper, unbiased source that examines claims from both sides of the argument. http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/sealhunt/

Good ol' CBC. I urge everyone to read the above and ignore the slanted propganada in the links from the first posts.


And from the Wiki (yes, I know, a less credible source) on the subject: The hunt has been alleged by some to be the largest commercial wildlife harvest in the world, however in fact, the Australian Kangaroo harvest easily eclipses any of the world's seal harvests, as its numbers range in the millions per year. Some lobbyists have continued to use images of seal pups in their fund-raising materials, though the harvesting of juvenile "white coats" has been banned since 1987

You don't see celebrities soliciting big cash donations to save the cute kangaroos, do you? *bitter, angry*

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It's not like I'm Seal Hitler calling for the extermination of the Seal Race, who have insiduously held down the Newfoundland people too long. Seals are mammals. It's natural for us to have empathy for them because of that. But if people are really concerned about threatened sea life, perhaps they should put aside that immediate emotional response and realize that fish are the ones in real trouble. We should be out protesting fishing fleets that use ridiculously small illegal mesh sizes in their nets, that vacuum clean international waters, that dump toxic fuel byproducts at sea with impugnity, and scoff at the slap on the wrist they might or might not be subject to for any of this. Those are the real butchers of the seal.

I maintain: what goes on in the seal hunt is no worse than what goes on in the meat industry at large --- except that the seals are free range and hormone and antibiotic free, so you can actually argue that in its favour. (and, yes, I think seal meat tastes rancid and vile, but I think the same of pig flesh, and I know people who enjoy seal very much).

If you're opposed to the killing of any animal, of course you'll be opposed to the seal hunt. But singling out the seal hunt as something extra special bad stinks, to me, of picking on the weakest kid in the school yard. Why get up in arms about something that employs more than 10,000 people (providing some of them with more than 1/3 of their annual income) in a place that, really, never got over the Great Depression? Why not warn people not to immigrate to Australia because of their kangaroo slaughters, or to boycott American products because of the widespread abuse of cows and chickens on factory farms?

Norway carries out an out-and-out cull of its seal herd each year; why isn't Norway also singled out for shame and reprimand?

And don't say the seal hunt isn't economically viable. The claim that it's bouyed up by the federal government is out and out false, and the price of a seal pelt at market has almost quintupled (that's right, quintupled) since the early 90's.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.