AR-News: So what's wrong with clubbing seals? (Daily Telegraph)

[Barry Kent MacKay]

      So what's wrong with clubbing seals?
              
            Boris Johnson 
            The Daily Telegraph 


      April 19, 2004
      LONDON - I don't know who handles the PR for these Canadian
seal-clubbers, but it must be a hell of a job. Can there be any group, on
the entire planet, that so excites the hatred of the British public? Not the
Italian butterfly-shooters, nor the Spanish goat-headyankers, no, not even
the French, who, as we all know, eat our children's ponies -- no one can
match the Canadian fisherman for provoking the Briton to tears of rage; and
one can see why.

      Here is a fellow who rises and puts on his great big waterproof boots
and his great big waterproof hat. Then he picks up a horrible knobkerrie,
studded with nails, gives his wife a loving kiss, and strides on to ice
floes where he sets about him with a terrible Hutu-style slaughter. Bonk
bash bonk he goes, like some demented axeman, and nothing will stop him. The
telephoto lenses of the RSPCA cameras whirr and click.

      Above him hover the helicopters chartered by the BBC, while live
pictures of the horror are beamed into every living room in Britain. Does he
care?

      Does he hell. And it is not just any old beast that he brains, but a
mammal, a creature like us that suckles its young; and it is a large,
defenceless mammal, with both eyes in the front of its head, in that cute
anthropomorphic way. It is a furry mammal, with a bark as faithful as any
Labrador.

      One after another, biff thunk clunk, the Canadians are now beating
these trusting little critters to death, thousands of them a day, until the
snow runs red in that awful way we saw on the front of the Independent
newspaper.

      Is there anyone who could possibly attempt to justify this kind of
barbarity? Will anyone stand up for the seal cull? Well, ahem, at the risk
of terminally alienating and offending animal lovers everywhere, it is the
duty of this column -- which ever puts logic above popularity -- to have a
go.

      Of course, it must be a dreadful way to go, if you are a seal; and no
one could seriously doubt that the method of killing is peculiarly brutal.
But I put it to you none the less that the Canadian fisherman has as much
right to go out clubbing as the average British 18-year-old.

      It was a good thing that there was an outcry in the early 1980s; and
it was a good thing that there was a consequent European Union-wide ban on
seal fur products. But that was when the cull had so reduced the populations
of harp and hooded seals that they were at real risk. That was when they
killed the little white baby seals as well, which particularly outraged our
sentimental feelings. The truth today is that there are now about six
million of these seals, and they are not spending all the time lolling
defencelessly on the ice. They are very efficient eaters of fish.

      They eat 1.5 tonnes of fish a year each, and given that there are only
50,000 tonnes of cod left off Newfoundland and Labrador, you can see that
the ecosystem is badly out of whack.

      It is true that the waters have been crazily overfished by the
Canadians themselves; but there seems to be good evidence that the voracity
of the seals has created a predator trap, by which the fish find it
impossible to breed faster than the seals can eat them. You could find what
looks like a more humane way of bumping off the seals, such as shooting
them. The trouble is that this method is barely more humane than clubbing,
and the gunshot lead is expensive and not environmentally friendly.

      And surely it makes sense, given how poor these fishermen are, to
prevent the pelts from being torn apart by bullets. You may feel affronted
by the scale of the slaughter; but I can't really see a moral difference
between authorizing the killing of 10,000 seals and 350,000.

      If it is really numbers of dead animals that shock you, let me remind
you that every year Britons herd 1.5 million cows and 12.5 million sheep
into the dark bellowing terror of dung-encrusted abattoirs, blap them with a
bolt in the brain and then slit their throats. We don't have Canadian camera
crews hovering above our meat-processing plants.

      And if it is not numbers that concern you, but the principle of taking
life, then let me remind you that 200,000 embryos are aborted every year in
this country; and if you think that is irrelevant, let me remind you that,
every year, in the People's Republic of China, 20,000 sentient adult human
beings are killed by the state. Isn't that, on the face of it, a more
natural subject for an Independent campaign?

      I tell you why the seal cull speaks so powerfully to us. It's telly,
innit? It's the shocking undisguisable picture of the lone killer on the ice
floe, the graphic impact of the red on the white.

      The seal cull provides a uniquely powerful image of what is in fact an
everyday event: the violence of man against animals, and the slaughter of
animals by man. It is the sheer conspicuousness of that killing that
prompts, in our breasts, our exaggerated response.

      Television images of violence can create alarm. They can create
outrage. But they are not always the whole story.

      Boris Johnson is MP for Henley and editor of The Spectator. 

      C National Post 2004
     

____________________________________________

  Barry Kent MacKay
  Canadian Representative 
  ANIMAL PROTECTION INSTITUTE 
  www.api4animals.org