Joann Groff
Editor in Chief
Don’t eat chickens, don’t skin rabbits and retire the 80s leather bomber jacket for good. We’ve all heard everyone from Greenpeace to PETA telling us what we are killing, harming or polluting by what we are wearing, burning or spraying in our hair. So how do we decide what’s important?
One cannot possibly adhere to every environmental standard that the hippies and vegetarians around the world are setting for us. We need iron and we need to get around and sometimes, even in SoCal, we need to keep warm.
My new cause may seem petty when stacked against the many horrors our world is facing today, but there is just something about a baby seal being bludgeoned, stabbed and skinned alive that really makes me want to take our friendly northern neighbors into the ring and keep punching after the bell chimes.
Canada’s seal hunt is now the largest commercial slaughter of wildlife in the world. Last winter the maple-leafers’ government announced that seal hunters could legally kill nearly 1 million harp seals over the following three years. While hunters cannot legally kill seal pups who still have their furry white coats, 96.6 percent of the 352,900 seals clubbed or shot last year were babies, only 12 days to 12 weeks old. It was the largest seal hunt in Canada since 1971 — by a landslide.
And despite the Canadian government’s claims that the hunt is humane and being surveyed with a watchful eye, independent veterinarians observing in 2001 saw hunters drag live seals across the ice with sharpened steel hooks, stockpile living pups with dead ones, and shoot seals only to leave them to suffer agonizingly slow deaths from blood loss. An estimated 40 percent of the pup victims were skinned while they were still alive.
International Fund for Animal Welfare officials documented thousands of horrific killings in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and northeast of Newfoundland. One such video the IFAW supervisors returned home with was an hour-long recording of a beaten, but live, seal pup lying in a pile of allegedly dead seals, trembling and crying. The tape shows IFAW supervisors and observers being ignored as they begged the hunters to put the seal out of its misery. Canada’s marine-mammal regulations and observer-permit laws prohibited the team from trying to help the suffering baby, let alone touch any seals or get in the way of the hunt.
Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans officials specifically designed the hunt to reduce the seal population, blaming the seals for preventing the recovery of devastated cod stocks. But there is no scientific basis for this justification — the cod population’s collapse is in actuality the result of the Canadians’ mismanagement of the fishery. Killing 1 million seals over the next three years, an outrageous number in an extraordinarily short time, will obviously lead to a serious and perhaps devastating decline in the population. The unknown ecological consequences of this drastic decrease are leaving scientists very concerned for the future of wildlife in parts of Canada. Furthermore, many don’t expect government officials to end the hunt when the quota is reached — already this year, the quota was surpassed (the limit each year is 350,000) and no punishment or violations have been recorded.
Hopefully if you’ve read all the way down here, you are as outraged at the horror of the baby seal hunt as I am, and not just because they are cute and furry and seem like they’d be nice to pet, but because it’s inhumane and cruel and unnecessary to allow our Earth’s precious wildlife to suffer needlessly. Or maybe you think it’s a bunch of crap that I’d actually ask for help to stop massive seal genocide in the mostly nice, unintrusive and pleasantly perched Canuck country. Sure the Great White North isn’t your typical target: the police wear funny hats and most everyone in the country is Christian, has a job, doesn’t have AIDS, can read and are pacifists (they aren’t even down with the war on drugs), but that doesn’t mean we need to head to the war-torn Middle East or the disease-ridden nations of Africa to find a problem that needs to be fixed, eh?
So, let’s not head north. I know we’d all like to ski in Whistler or go up to Vancouver and just chill, but we need to send a message.
Also, Sen. Carl Levin has introduced a resolution (S. 269) urging Canada to end the hunt — ask your senators to support it by calling the U.S. Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121 or visit www.senate.gov to send an e-mail. Check out www.protectseals.org or e-mail protect-seals@hsus.org to request postcards you can send the Canadian embassy.
And don’t forget the first step, which is simple. Stop telling that joke about the baby seal that walks into a club. It’s about as funny as the thought of you being skinned alive.
1-27-2005
