Canada’s seal hunt fights back
Cute, eh?
People do get touchy about things like animals. Or food.
Not to mention money.
Many North Americans love a good steak, sliced from an animal Hindus consider sacred. Observant Muslims and Jews avoid pork. I can think of several cultures that consider a nice, tender dog quite the delicacy. As a child, our son was horrified to learn I quite enjoy lamb. (“Mom, how can you eat babies?”) Meanwhile, my vegetarian husband won’t eat anything that has to be killed first – excluding plants.
Japan is widely reviled for continuing to hunt and eat whale. That nation is getting even more bad PR thanks to The Cove, an Oscar-winning feature documentary on a methodical dolphin slaughter in Taiji, Japan
Enter Canada and the seal hunt.
Images of baby seals getting clubbed to a bloody death on white ice flows proved so gruesome that the practice has been banned since 1987. But more restricted seal harvests continue, and remain a significant economic activity in some communities where there isn’t much else going on.
Canada’s East Coast seal hunt is the largest of its kind in the world, with an average annual kill of about 300,000 harp seals. It exported around $5.5 million worth of seal products such as pelts, meat, and oils to the EU in 2006.
Animal rights groups, such as Sea Sheperd, have worked to end economic seal hunts that have little to do with subsistence hunting. The campaigns succeed to the point that the European Union enacted a ban on most seal products which will take effect in August 2010.
The seal hunt has defenders too, including this industry site, which has a page dedicated to challenging what it calls ‘myths’.
Canada’s Gov. Gen. Michaëlle Jean made headlines last May when she pointedly ate raw seal heart on a tour up north. That played very well in Canada, since she was visiting a local community where hunting is a matter of cultural and personal survival.
The issue moved to Parliament Hill last week Wednesday, when politicians from all parties eagerly partook of a lunch spread featuring seal, sponsored by Liberal Quebec Senator Celine Hervieux-Payette, in support of the seal industry.
The event generated wide coverage, from local media, to European and British press, all the way to Australia.
According to this CBC account:
It is the first time seal has been served in the 100-year-old Parliament Hill institution. And all the double-smoked bacon wrapping, port reductions and organic vegetable medleys couldn’t mask the meal’s true intention: telling animal rights groups and the European Union to get stuffed.
A Reuter’s report that included 6 photos quoted Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff thusly:
“The Europeans simply don’t know what they’re talking about. Since time began human beings have lived with animals and they have culled animals…It tastes delicious, actually. It’s a meaty taste, a little gamy”
In the face of the EU ban, Canada has looked elsewhere to market seal products, including reaching out to the Chinese market.
These issues get complicated. Personally, I’m very sympathetic to the earth-friendly vegetarian cause, but I can’t see that choice working for everyone. It also seems very hard to dismiss arguments about animal intelligence, the threat of extinction and outright cruelty.
On the other hand, maintaining it’s OK to eat very smart creatures – like pigs and octopus – while making dolphins and dogs off limits, seems culturally selective to the point of hypocrisy.
When humans kill animals, what moral and ecological code makes sense – without playing favorites among countries? Or species?
