A Defence of the Seal Hunt

Life in Geneva as a stay-at-home husband is hard. I wake up late. I read books I’ve always wanted to read. I enter essay writing contests and write long emails about the seal hunt. I iron clothes I ironed the day before, and I discuss with my hostess, Madame Bloch, the merits of the British Monarchy. Sometimes I stroll the streets and strike up long conversations with the American Mormons It has now gotten to the point that, when they see me coming, they start to run the other way.

Part of my daily routine involves watching the news from Canada via the internet. So you can imagine my surprise when one day I see one of my musical heroes, Paul McCartney, visiting my neck of the woods! Once I found out why he was there though, I couldn’t help but mutter to myself and shake my fist at the screen. No, Paul wasn’t there to promote his music. Nor was he visiting an Indian healer looking for inspiration for his new album. Instead, he was spooning a baby seal for a photo-op and calling on the Canadian government to halt the seal hunt.

At first I couldn’t decide whether or not the ex-Beatle was being intentionally disingenuous or simply ignorant. Surely whoever put Paul McCartney up to this selfless media stunt must have informed him that the killing of baby seals (the ones with white fur) was banned many moons ago. I then realize Paul McCartney, the man who brought us classics like ‘Yesterday,’ ‘Live and let die,’ and my favourite, the acid-inspired White Album, doesn’t have a clue. The same man who co-wrote the song ‘revolution’ to denounce those who wanted to exploit his celebrity status to promote socialism had been tricked into lending his name to a cause he knows very little about.

Just how detached Mr. McCartney was became clear in a debate on CNN. In an interview with Larry King, Danny Williams, a former Rhodes Scholar and the premier of Newfoundland and Labrador, invites Paul McCartney to come to Newfoundland(or, “New Finland,” according to Larry King).

“But I’m already in Newfoundland!!” Mr. McCartney yells with moral indignation, his wife nodding with approval.

Apparently someone forgot to put the sign on the back of his guitar; he was in Prince Edward Island. That is, err, a different province. But I mean really, what’s the difference, right? Both are Islands lost in the Atlantic where people talk funny and eat cheap lobster that should be reserved for rich people. Surely he can be forgiven. I mean really, is there anyone amongst us who knows the real difference between Liverpool, London or Luton? Be honest.

Let us go back to the photo-op. Of course, a photo with a full grown seal would not go over so well. Full grown seals, if you’ve never seen one, are ugly. They are huge beasts whose upper and lower jaws are connected by permanent strings of saliva. Their cries resemble what you would imagine it must have sounded like when Odysseus blinded the Cyclops. You wouldn’t curl up to one for a picture, not only because if it rolled on top of you it’d crush your bones and you’d die instantly, but also because their breath smells like their diet: raw fish intestines. Imagine Brian Wilson at the peak of his obesity without having shaved or stepped out of bed for a number of years, and then you’ve got yourself a full-grown seal.

The camera then switches to the Canadian Embassy in Washington where a couple of dozen full-time executives, part-time protestors, take their lunch hour to cry shame on the Canadian government. The smell of triple-latte capo-macho-chinos and the buzzing of cell phones and blackberries set the stage for the SUV-driving John Kerry-supporting movement of popular resistance. Apparently the insurgency must have marched past the Zimbabwean Embassy, the North Korean Embassy, the Embassy of Uzbekistan, Belarus, etc, deciding not to stop, only to disembark in front of the house representing those drunk and harmless northerners who end every sentence with “eh!”.

“What do you think about people who hunt seals?” a brave reporter asks.

“They’re ignorant!”

“They’re backwards!”

“They have no compassion!”

Have you ever heard the saying that the things you don’t like about other people are really the things you don’t like about yourself?

Atlantic Canada is a humble place which, like the rest of the world, is trying to carve its own modernizing path through the vast tornado we call globalization. Flying over Newfoundland you get the impression from above that, if we ever decide to colonize mars, it’ll probably look something like this. The interior of the Island looks like a deserted crater, and it is only really the edges where you find small enclaves of the greatest people on earth, that for some reason only tend to live on Islands. These are towns where everyone still knows the names of all their neighbours. In these parts strangers wave at strangers, just in case they might meet them later. These are the kinds of people who don’t lock their doors, and if you asked them why, they’d say, “but what would happen if someone came by and I wasn’t home to receive them? How would they get in?”

And like many rural places around the world, these people deal everyday with a harsh economic reality. Tens of thousands of Newfoundlanders have left for the oil patches of Alberta. Others have gone on to study at University and then moved to Toronto to take up jobs as computer technicians and engineers. Unlike migrants from some places though, few Newfounlanders, and Atlantic Canadians in general, don’t dream of someday making it back to the places where people treat each other right.

And then there are those who stay. Many are fisherman. Newfoundland used to boom thanks to the generous access to the ocean. Then, after many years of over fishing by both domestic and foreign trolleys, fishing all but died out. Many people in these communities survive through the harsh winter on the checks they get from the government for being seasonal workers. They are in a catch-22. The country wants them to do the seasonal jobs because we enjoy the products they produce, especially seafood. Yet we call them lazy and stubborn for not finding work in the off season. The problem is that, even if they have a trade, few businesses hire people for only a few months at a time. In fact, most of the time seasonal workers aren’t working are down periods for every other industry.

One of the ways some people get by is through the seal hunt. Many of the seal hunters eat only what they kill with their bare hands, and in the summer they grow as much as they can to be subsistent. They’re lifestyles are far less of a threat to the environment than the protestors who call them ignorant and backwards. Contrary to the common belief that these people are bloodthirsty killers, they actually live in a weird communion with the animals they hunt. It is something that is hard to explain, and definitely isn’t evident when you observe the hunt in action. For example, one seal hunter interviewed acts as a tour guide, bringing the animal-rights tourists to see the seals he himself will kill once their fur changes colour. As the reporter correctly points out, people like the McCartney’s will spend more on a single trip to the ice-floats than most seal-hunters will make in a season. The same seal hunter starts to tear up when the reporter asks him about his job. As a tough skinned man who normally speaks his few words into his chest, you know he’s not the kind of guy who sheds a tear for the sake of the camera.

Back in Washington one of the protestors screams into the camera, as if reciting from a pamphlet:

“BUT THE MONEY THEY MAKE IS ONLY A SMALL PORTION OF THEIR INCOME!”

This is true. However, when they make so little anyways, what is small change in the till at Starbucks is a lot to a seal hunter. It might allow him to send his kid to college. It might mean saving for retirement. Either way, it is an income he wouldn’t otherwise have. I might also add that I can say from experience that seal meat is definitely an acquired taste. If you ever tried it and then thought that it could be a part of your regular diet, you’d realize just how hard up some of these people are.


That same seal hunter is also doing himself and the fishing industry a favour. The seal population in the Atlantic is around 5,000,000. A population that large eats a huge amount of fish. If the seals aren’t hunted the species of fish we are trying to revive might fall into extinction. The seal quota, set by the federal government, is about 325,000, which isn’t very much when you consider the overall population. All of those vegetarians who like to chow done on Atlantic Salmon might wish to send a thank you card to the guys doing the ugly job of helping sustain the fishery.

The killing of animals, whether for food or for fashion, or sport, is never a pretty business. The benefit that large-scale meat production has is that it takes place behind closed doors instead of on an open ice-float. When you unwrap your processed McBurger, you don’t hear the screams of whatever animal you happen to be eating, nor do you see the blood splattered on the floor. You can safely avoid the smell of the severed hooves, still smouldering from the process that detached them.

Nor do we see the likes of McCartney snuggling up to alligators or the other not-so-cute animals that make up a part of our wardrobe on a daily basis. Why pay thousands to go to a cold ice-float in the middle of the Atlantic when you can instead take a nice trip to Geneva, light on fire the thousands upon thousands of Genevois Grandmothers who proudly wear fur, as if their dead husbands killed the animal with his bare hands, and then at least you can go skiing on the weekend.

As one park-ranger pointed, not everyone caught up in the rush of globalization wants to be a management consultant. Some people will continue to decide to live off the land and make money the only way they know how, and they deserve that right. There is no reason why we should all abandon the places we call home because free-market ideology says that we should sacrifice our lifestyles on the alter of cheap imports. If everyone decided not to stick out the winter, there would never be a Canada, or a Finland, Norway, Sweden, or some of the other countries who continually lay claim to the highest standard of living in the world.

It’s time we be honest with ourselves about the entire production of our excessive western lifestyles, from the exploited farmers who harvests our coffee beans, to the sweat-shop teenage girls who make our wardrobes, to the not-so-cute animals whose meat, parts, and fur also make their way into the clothes we wear and the food we eat. Being selectively indignant may make us feel better now, but its not going to help us on the magical mystery tour down the long and winding road towards environmentally sustainable and balanced lifestyles.

Yours truly,

MCA