Seal hunt begins; IFAW bears witness

"KrakAttiK" wrote in message
...
March 23, 2004

Fri, April 16, 2004

The slaughter of the truth
By MICHAEL HARRIS -- For the Ottawa Sun




Not much has changed since that brilliant March day back in 1981 on the St.
John's waterfront when Captain Morrissey Johnson threw a Greenpeace
demonstrator off the deck of the Lady Johnson before setting sail for the
annual Newfoundland seal hunt.

I can still hear the smack. The young lady hit the wharf with a thud heard
around the world. The crowd of Newfoundlanders cheered lustily. They were
there for the traditional blessing of the fleet, wishing safe passage for
their "swilers" and they didn't appreciate the international condemnation
and humiliation that the "come-from-aways" were dishing out.

What their urban denouncers did not know is that many of the people on the
dock that day had lost family members in the annual trek to the hunt which
had been going on since 1800. In the 19th century, the seal hunt, then a
land-based harvest, accounted for a staggering one-third of Newfoundland's
exports. Much of the island's history has been written in human blood in the
twin quest for cod and seal.

To this day, seal flippers are a hot commodity on the St. John's waterfront
every spring, the main ingredient in flipper pie. Newfoundland is a place
where rural people still have their feed of moose, caribou, seal, ptarmigan,
and wild salmon according to the season. There are no sushi restaurants in
places like Harbour Grace, Twillingate, or Harbour Breton. But there is the
land and sea and everything in them.

All these years later, emotions are still running high. In the United
Kingdom, the Independent made the seal hunt its lead story under the
headline, "The Bloody Slaughter." Even the BBC intoned that up to 350,000
"baby seals" would be killed this season, a gross distortion of the facts.
And so the standoff continues. Newfoundlanders sorely resent their
vilification by animal rights activists and the protesters continue to
display an appalling ignorance and opportunistic exploitation of the seal
hunt. Brigitte Bardot may have been replaced by Paris Hilton as the poster
girl of the anti-sealing lobby, but the appeal is unchanged; a triumph of
marketing over matter.

Forgotten in the bloody pictures of "whitecoats" being clubbed to death is
the harsh reality of all animal slaughter. Whether it is chickens in a mass
production facility, cattle in a stockyard, or seals on the March ice off
Newfoundland's northeast coast, there is nothing pleasant about the
commercial harvesting of any living creature for human consumption --
regardless of what part is being consumed.

Most of our urban kill floors are dark inner sanctums the public never gets
to see. The great difference in the seal hunt is that it is an outdoor
abattoir operation involving wild animals. The blood that is spilled is
there for all to see. The impact is gruesome enough against the dazzling
white snow and ice, but when you depict the slaughter of a baby seal that
looks more like a stuffed toy than a creature in the wild it is emotionally
devastating.

It was largely because of that horrific image that the International Fund
for Animal Welfare (IFAW) was able to raise $80 million a year to fund their
anti-seal hunt protests in the 1980s -- an amount six times greater than the
entire budget of the Newfoundland Fisheries Department to run an industry
and fight back against well-financed detractors.

Newfoundlanders are appalled by the hypocrisy factor. The French could
force-feed geese to bloat their livers for foie gras, calves could be
dispatched by the thousands for their livers and veal cutlets, lambs could
be butchered for their prized rack, and cattle might be dismembered alive on
slaughterhouse assembly lines, but there weren't many photo ops (or for that
matter photographers), for those far vaster but largely accepted varieties
of death on wheels.

The icefields are another matter. Protesters documented, and in some cases,
orchestrated, the most horrific images imaginable in which Newfoundlanders
came across as sadistic brutes who routinely skinned baby seals alive for
fun and profit. The protesters were so good at public relations that by 1983
the large-vessel seal hunt in Newfoundland was closed as country after
country, including the United States, caved in to Greenpeace and the IFAW
and banned the sale of seal products within their borders.

More importantly, the real poster star of the anti-sealing campaign, the
cute and cuddly whitecoat, has not been hunted since 1987, when it was given
legal protection by the federal government -- protection that extends to
this day. Yet when the Department of Fisheries and Oceans sanctioned this
year's cull of 300,000 harp seals, the anti-sealing lobby reproduced
pictures of the same animals that are no longer being hunted to condemn a
practice that they have seriously distorted and never understood. The
U.S.-based Humane Society is taking full-page ads in big American newspapers
to urge a travel boycott on Canada -- the same group that was silent on the
destruction of migratory salmon stocks at the hands of U.S. fishermen.

The successful closing down of the annual seal hunt has been devastating to
coastal communities in Newfoundland. Traditionally, the hunt provided
fishermen with their first cash of the year and a means of outfitting
themselves for the new fishing season. Since 1992, when the cod fishery was
closed because of gross human overfishing, the intervention on behalf of the
harp and hooded seal has led to an explosion in the size of their herds at
the worst possible moment. In 1983, when the commercial hunt was closed,
there were 3.1 million harp seals and roughly 450,000 hooded seals. Today,
the herd has doubled in size, and that is bad news for Newfoundland's
decimated cod stocks.

Seals are prodigious feeders. They eat fish to the tune of 6% of their body
weight per day. Although cod comprise only 3% of the seal's diet, the size
of the herd has a deadly multiplier effect. In 1994, seals consumed 88,000
metric tonnes of cod off Newfoundland's northeast coast, compared to just
24,000 tonnes caught by the commercial fishery in the last year of the cod
fishery before the closure. The grim fact comes down to this: Whether seals
eat juvenile cod (38,000 fish to the tonne) or the cod's favorite food,
caplin, they have a profound effect on the ocean's food web when their
numbers are very high and the northern cod has been all but wiped out.
Protecting one animal in the ocean's ecosystem without understanding the
impact of the intervention on others is not compassion but tampering. For
years, the sorcerer's apprentice has been loose on the Grand Banks. Perhaps
that is why Greenpeace, traditionally a vocal opponent of the hunt, has
decided not to campaign against the cull this year.

Did the seals wipe out the northern cod? No, man did. Is every part of the
seal hunt noble? Of course not. The harvesting of animals for their penises
which are a hot aphrodisiac in China, is deplorable. (The practice has been
banned.) But for the 11,000 Newfoundlanders who still get an important part
of their income from today's limited seal hunt, they are not there to feed
China's erotic fantasies or skin baby animals alive. They are there to cling
to their bald rock and make a living with what's at hand, just as they've
always done.

Within the regulations of the hunt and the fiats of basic humanity, they
should be left alone to do it.