Comments on: Veterinarians and the seal hunt

By: vick

vick — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 07:37:16 +0000

all of the people who do this are sick pussies. clubbing baby animals is just as fucking wrong as shaking babies. it’s MORE wrong.

By: joe

joe — Wed, 27 May 2009 16:28:05 +0000

THIS IS SOOOOOOOOOOO MEAN HOW COULD YOU DO THIS TO AN INNOSENT SEAL!!!! yOU ARE A JERK!!!!!!!!!

By: Alison

Alison — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 16:05:29 +0000

Senator Halb :
“The price of pelts has dropped from $62 in 2007 to $31 in 2008, and will be even lower in 2009. Pelts are stacked up in warehouses—50,000 in Newfoundland, 140,000 in Greenland. No seal furs were sold at international fur auction in Copenhagen in all of 2008, and no seal pelts sold at the January 2009 fur auction in North Bay, Ontario. Yet Canadian taxpayers will continue to support the commercial seal hunt—paying for icebreakers, providing rescue support when sealers run into difficulty, marketing seal products, and sending delegations abroad to defend the hunt and lobby foreign governments.”

It’s been a while since I read up on the seal “hunt”.
Halb’s article reminded me that there is a US boycott targetting Canadian Atlantic seafood to protest the hunt. A couple of years ago the US market for snowcrab ground to an almost complete halt.

Halb tabled a bill in the Senate last month to begin transitioning seal hunters to other employment. Shamefully not one single other senator supported it.

By: deBeauxOs

deBeauxOs — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 01:22:04 +0000

Oh, I agree with every concern you’ve raised, brebis noire. My process-oriented mind always reverts to the reality that a sudden ban of the commercial seal-hunt that doesn’t involve the hunters and their communities in the development of alternative work or employment opportunities will engender human misery instead.

By: mouthyorange

mouthyorange — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 00:17:58 +0000

Glad you did this, bn; glad to see it. The baby seal hunt feels so wrong to me. I’m aware of the other issues to do with it, but it continues to feel very wrong.

By: brebisnoire

brebisnoire — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 23:14:40 +0000

Alison, that is very interesting – you made me do some research, as I did not know that NL and Labrador are where 2/3 of commercial seal hunt takes place. Who, in the end, is benefitting the most, economically, from the annual slaughter? It looks like it makes up anywhere from 5-30% of seal hunters total annual income, so it’s a supplement rather than a primary activity. It may only take a few days out of the year.

The cultural and social considerations involved are complicated – or not – depending on how you look at it. If you look at Canada as a whole as a resource-providing place, then look at the history of those resources and the history of the labour that have hunted or mined or hewed them. They are never the winners; they are always the losers – and they are very big losers indeed when the wood runs our or is no longer wanted, the fish populations decline, the seal furs are no longer wanted, or the seals have died off. The commercial hunt is the problem, and the CVMA is right, on one hand, to be concerned about its sustainability.

But I am also concerned with the lack of empathy involved in such slaughters, and the sheer butchery of it – for what? We’re not talking about the aboriginal hunt here, which is a very different seal hunt. This is purely a commercial hunt, another activity that commodifies animal flesh, and this one is particularly brutal. I think the vets involved need to take a look at the bigger picture of the commercial hunt, and wonder what they are getting themselves into with this.

By: deBeauxOs

deBeauxOs — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 20:26:03 +0000

It’s complicated too, from the perspective of the people who hunt, slaughter and “harvest” the young seals for their pelt.

This is the work that they do (it’s not a sport, is it?) as source of income for themselves, their families and their communities – hate it or not. There are a number of cultural and social considerations involved that would not be addressed (I suspect) by the Federal Government paying them a lump sum not to hunt seals.

By: Alison

Alison — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 19:55:19 +0000

Fisheries and Oceans Canada reports that in Canada we’ve upped our quota by 55,000 to 338,200 seals from last year. I was surprised to learn that the combined quota for Norway and Greenland is 50,000. So now that Putin has banned the killing of baby seals under a year old, effectively ending commercial seal hunting in Russia, I guess we’ve pretty well cornered the market in seal slaughter.
I was also surprised to learn via FOC that :
“Approximately 1% of the total population of Newfoundland and Labrador derive income from sealing.”
1% ?
Given the millions spent on policing this “hunt” via icebreakers and helicopters and court costs and bureaucracy, why can’t we just give that 1% the money to stay home?