Those Savagely Heartless Canadians

Here we go again. Sealing time rearing its head along with those of all those harp seals curiously innocent about the presence in their midst of those cruel hunters intent on clubbing them to death. Thanks to a public pressure campaign of condemnation Canada no longer permits the seal hunt to include those cute bug-eyed baby white-coat seals. It is now only the mature harp seals of which there are an estimated six million off the east coast of Canada, that are hunted.

It's a miserably cruel thing, the hunt. We would know that because of the work of activists in filming the process and screening the results world-wide to ensure that soft-hearted people everywhere were properly scandalized and demanded cessation of that inhuman practise. Mind, not too many people are all that interested in visiting the slaughter-houses in their own communities, since they're convinced there are no such institutions and that beef, pork, lamb and chicken appear magically in supermarkets, neatly saran-wrapped.

"They've said publicly that we are barbarians and we massacre seals," said Jean-Claude Lapierre, head of the seal hunters' association on the Magdalen Islands. "Our reputation has been sullied across the planet." That's the early hunt, but most of the action takes place off the coast of Newfoundland where traditional fishing communities were utterly devastated by the collapse of cod stocks in the 1990s.

The seal hunt is one of the few traditional harvesting activities of the sea now sustaining these remote coastal towns. "It's a form of pride...we go hunting to earn our bread, to find money to feed our families," explained Mr. Lapierre. Hunters earned roughly $26 million Cdn last year from pelts alone. And there is a growing market for seal products such as oil high in omega 3 fatty acids.

For Canadian sealers this way of life is critical to their survival. Hunters in the Magdalen Islands earn as little as $10,000 a year, half of which is derived from one week of the seal hunt. For sealers' families who rely on social assistance payments to help them eke out their existence the hunt helps maintain some personal dignity, pride in a traditional way of life that enables them to fend for themselves.

Yet the Humane Society of the United States revels in the public furore they're able to drum up, counting on the help of some high-profile celebrities to aid and assist them in their dedication to the goal of killing off this commercial hunt, this legitimate harvesting of products of the sea. The European Union's Parliament is also weighing in on the issue of commercial sealing in Canada.

People have a tendency to view veneers, to let themselves be manipulated, to forget to delve a little deeper into the meaning of things. They've conveniently lost their memory about where their own foods come from; the harvesting of farm animals to produce the meat they put on their dinner tables. They overlook the tendency of most societies to value seasonal hunts, unnecessary for human survival, where wild animals are hunted and slaughtered in an ages-old custom once necessary, no longer so.

Commercial abattoirs are one thing, much as we prefer not to think about their existence. Society accepts the fact of their presence for the perceived greater good of the fulfilment of human needs and appetites. Yet in Germany alone 1.2 million deer and over a half-million wild boars are taken as game over the course of a year.

The world is suffering a hallucinatory attack of hypocrisy in attacking a well-managed, humane and sustainable seal harvest in Canada.