Sustainable harvest, or intolerable cruelty?

[urbpan]

I haven't posted about any controversial topics lately, but I just read an article about seal hunting (best headline ever: Cute, cuddly, edible) that got me interested. I've read posts from people on my friends list from people that were passionate about the topic, from pro and con perspectives. I'd love to hear discussion here, but let's keep it civil and above the belt, okay?


The article (click the headline link above to read it) is quite level in tone and does a good job of presenting the less-well-known pro-seal hunting side of the story. Ecologically speaking, the Canadian seal hunt is quite sustainable; in other words, at the level that seals are being hunted, the practice could continue for a long time without having an impact on the total seal population or the environment. This is more you can say for much of the fishing industry, or even the petroleum industry for that matter.

But what of the spectacle of beefy men bloodily whacking cute seals on the head with pointed clubs (which I learned from the article are called "hakapiks")? Surely this display of barbarism is cruelty to animals at its most graphic. According to "a study published in the Canadian Veterinary Journal," 98% of the clubbings are considered humane. This percentage far exceeds, for example, the rates of successful humane slaughter performed in North American cattle and pig processing plants (http://204.200.219.26/survey/2007.restaurant.audits.html). A hakapik in proficient hands is more humane than a rifle shot (sometimes suggested as a middle ground between hunt-banners and seal-clubbing).

I think this comes back to what the McCartneys said: "If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian." What is meant by this is that the acceptance of meat eating requires a certain amount of denial. If the seals were clubbed in a windowless cinderblock building instead of out on a treeless landscape in front of cameras, there wouldn't be a serious effort to ban the hunt.

No one wants to watch animals be killed, and yet most people want to eat meat. What moral grounds does a seal-hunt ban have? Should those who support a ban on the Canadian seal-hunt themselves be banned from eating meat? How long until a performance artist builds a glass-walled slaughterhouse?

Comments

"How long until a performance artist builds a glass-walled slaughterhouse?"

[g-weir.livejournal.com]

And inside? David Blane, once again holding his breath for an extended period.

[g-weir.livejournal.com]

Also, today I fed dried kangaroo strips to a dog. Their hypo-allergenic!

[ms-cantrell.livejournal.com]

while people are buying meat at the grocery store, they have no leg to stand on as far as seal hunting is concerned.

[badnoodles.livejournal.com]

I see it as not much different than deer hunting. As long as the seals are being sustainably harvested, and killed as humanely as possible, I don't have the slightest problem with it. Or at least, dramatically less problem than I do with the Canadian fur council's similar stance.

[ssorca19.livejournal.com]

Personally (as one who has worked with wild seals) I dont like it, but understand it, as others have said, its similar to hunting deer, it does help to keep the numbers in check. Though i do despise the clubbing method, whether they say its more humane or not, from the few videos i've seen (and no, they arent all from peta) its not like the seals just keel over and die right away. If you can get close enough to club them, you should be close enough to put instantaneous death in the form of a bullet into their head, right? I dunno, i've never tried, myself.

And as an aside (actually the original reason i decided to post, but then i felt i needed to debate pro/con-ness) they claim that seal meat is one of the healthiest, leanest meats you can find (the meat, not the blubber!) and that eating it can actually LOWER your cholesterol. Maybe we should all start eating seal to be a healthier country! Cant you just see the ad campaign now?

[roaming.livejournal.com]

How is clubbing a baby* in any way "humane"? I don't think it's about eating meat: it's about cruelty to the meat before you eat it.

And anytime ANYthing is killed just so a person can wear their skin for vanity's sake, I'm offended by that. You're starving? Fine. Eat it. You're freezing? Fine, wear it. IF you don't have another option. You want to torture the poor thing while you're killing it? Here, let me get Biblical eye-for-an-eye on your ass. It's inane to say we respect life, but only in certain forms: cute, cuddly, pets.

"The question is not 'can they reason' or 'can they think', but 'can they SUFFER?'"

I don't think it's wrong to eat meat/animals. I think it's wrong to cause them pain or fear. I'd be fine with getting my meat from a local farmer who humanely kills them, one at a time, instead of the conveyor belt factory farming method, only because the latter has too many slip-ups in the process. (I'm on a waiting list for a local met CSA. A waiting list! Imagine. We've come a long way, baby. ;-)) No, of course I don't want to watch it. But if that was the price of getting the meat, then it's the least I can do: be aware, not in denial.

If I had to kill my own meat, yeh, I'd be a vegetarian. I blame it on growing up on Disney.



*(clubbing anything, actually, seems brutal, but "baby" anything brings out the nurturing in most humans, especially females. I remember reading an article about the movie Dragon Slayer, in which the guy who designed the baby dragons our hero has to kill along the way said he found it impossible to make them look young and also not "cute", because anytime something has a babyish face, we're genetically programmed, so they say, to want to protect/nurture it.)

[wirrrn.livejournal.com]

It may be sustainable, but it's not necessary- we don't need to eat meat- and even if we did, most people would prefer a beef burger than a seal one. It's for the fur, peeps.

This practice just as repugnantly barbaric as Japan, Iceland and Norway hunting whales and Britain's fox hunts (my country ain't lily-white either- just ask the Barrow Island Turtle and the Dingo). Animals and plants aren't here for our use as resources, humans!

Re: "How long until a performance artist builds a glass-walled slaughterhouse?"

[brush-rat.livejournal.com]

Oh, I see. I hadn't correctly divined your attitude towards your seals.

[(Anonymous)]

What 'roaming' said.

Remember that scene in the first Michael Moore movie (must've been Roger & Me) where the woman who raises rabbits kills and skins one onscreen? So many people were upset by that. Surprisingly, it didn't really bother me, *because I didn't perceive the animal as suffering*. It went from living to dead quickly and any pain likely only registered for a split second, if at all. (Recall that the guillotine was invented to be a humane style of execution). Similarly, I finally came to the conclusion that hunting, when done respectfully and skillfully (i.e. a good shot), is far more humane than factory farming.

So the other issues are sustainability and, well, vanity. Killing baby seals, no matter how gory or sanitized the method,
for luxury furs is wasteful and, to use an old-fashioned word, prideful.

More I could say, but gotta get to work!
~Flaneuse in DC

[weofodthignen]

Yeah, roaming says some good stuff. And as someone who doesn't like the taste of meat and hence avoids eating it, I have a relatively clear conscience.

The thing is, apart from the fur angle, which is deplorable, there's also the local culture angle. One of my most valued online friends is from one of the places where this is part of the traditional way of life. There are traditional ways of life to which my response is "Find another job, scum." Timber-cutting and, especially, tobacco-growing communities get that from me. But seal-clubbing isn't the only thing these people do, they didn't start doing it to build a market (one reason they do it is because the seals eat the fish that are an important component of their diet), and they need it as well as other things to survive in that locale--which gets shamefully little from the rest of the country. (The province didn't even send tanker planes when there was a forest fire.) Poor seals. I hate the thought of them being clubbed in front of their mothers. I hope the seals find a safe place to have their babies, and I hope some new unimagined resource is discovered in my friend's homeland so they can ignore the seals.

M