Unsavoury Animal Products

The Ottawa Citizen, Editorial Cartoon, 28 November 2013

"More than 6,000 restaurants and grocery stores (in addition to 800,000 individuals) have joined the Protect Seals boycott of Canadian seafood. They are making it clear that the Canadian annual commercial seal hunt is an unacceptable business practice undertaken by Canada's fishing industry."
"Canada's sealers make much more money from exporting seafood to the United States than they do from killing seal pups, and this gives us a lever".
Chefs for Seals, United States 

 


The World Trade Organization has just brought down a ruling in favour of the European Union, giving it the benefit of "public moral concerns" of the animals' welfare. Canada plans to appeal the ruling within the 60 days' opportunity. But it doesn't much look like anyone other than Inuit and Newfoundland's traditional seal hunters are interested in prolonging a way of life that brings a few extra dollars to sealers' basic earnings.

The Humane Society of the United States, an impressively powerful lobby group for animal welfare and conservation is largely behind the effort to boycott Canada's seal hunt in the United States, and politicians there are listening not merely politely, but because there are votes there; like the environmental lobby in general such lobbies have the ear of those lawmakers who can make things happen, or not.

Seals, as it happens, are not endangered, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature lists harp sales as being at "least concern" status, while the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans indicated in a 2011 report on the status of Northwest Atlantic harp seals: "The current population is at its highest level seen in the 60-year time series."

It's estimated that there are eight million harp seals inhabiting Newfoundland's east coast, representing a figure 400% higher than the Department of Fisheries and Oceans' 1950 estimate. Of the annual total allowable catch between 1971 and 2013, sealers managed to harvest on average roughly 65% of the total allowable. The Northwest Atlantic harp seal is considered hugely predatory; to preserve fish stocks that they prey upon some population control is required to mitigate the obvious ecological impact.

The seals represent a major impediment to the potential of regenerating Newfoundland's traditional fish population. The explosive growth rate of harp seals sees no boundaries without culling. The European Union, despite its resistance to Canadian seal products sees no problem itself in seal culling for the protection of its own fish stocks. But this is a typical kind of action on the part of the European Union; protecting its own needs while huffing and puffing over what they see wrong in the solutions brought to bear by those outside their purview.

Since it makes no commercial or practical or conservationist sense to continue to reject the Canadian seal hunt, environmentalists and animal rights lobbyists resort to the emotional appeal, and it works. Though it makes little sense, and represents the epitome of irrationality. Inhumane practices in the animal slaughter industry to provide populations with the end products that they savour at their dinner table are rightfully decried. Factory-type farming is by its very nature cruel.

But the seals are free agents, living their natural lives unrestricted, free to roam where they will. They are harvested just like any other edible commodity that human beings bring to their dinner table. And they are harvested humanely; the Canadian Veterinary Medical Association and the World Wildlife Fund consider the hakapik, the club used by seal hunters (Inuit use harpoons), to be an efficient, humane tool. The slaughter of newborn seals is no longer an issue; it is outlawed.

Unless and until the world turns to transiting from an globally omnivorous appetite to one focusing on vegetable matter exclusively, in a virtuous recognition that animals slaughtering other animals for consumption causes distress to those animals sacrificed to the appetite of the animals considering themselves to represent a higher order of organism, the issue of seal hunting will remain an absurd and illogical conceit.