Sunday, December 13, 2009

Canada Fights Back

Canada's recent stance on sealing is brilliant.

The anti-sealers are wrong. They're wrong to attack traditional hunting, wrong to attack the environmental hakapik, wrong to imply that sealing is less ethical than raising commercial livestock, wrong to overpromote this cause just because cute big-eyed white seal pups (which aren't even hunted) are effective in money-raising campaigns.

When our Governor General went on camera and ate raw seal heart - wowee! That was great stuff. After years of protests and boycotts against Canada, we're finally doing something to fight back. (Or at least thumb our noses.) In the long run our side will prevail because we're right.

Seal hunting is the traditional sustenance of small portions of our population, both aboriginal and non-aboriginal northerners following long-standing traditions. We're not talking about giant Japanese harvesting ships. We're not talking about Americans with semi-automatic rifles flying in helicopters. These are men who walk the ice floes with a stick with a hook on the end, just as their forefathers have for hundreds of years.

I don't wear fur or like fur. I don't support sport hunting. But we don't all live in cities. We don't all buy our food in plastic wrap. There is nothing environmental about the anti-sealing movement. It's an attack on a traditional way of life. Unfortunately, it's a tried-and-true way for organizations to raise a whole lot of moolah. So let's keep up the public displays of our Inuit culture.

My other musings on the anti-sealing movement

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3 comments:

Jingles said...

People just love eating chicken don't they? Chicken raised in awful circumstances seem to be yummy and it's such an ugly bird. Chicken are eaten all year round.
I wear a fur coat where the fur was raised in a farming situation...now tell me the difference between that and raising animals to eat. At least sealing is done once a year and with a quota.

Bert said...

AND, if the hunt were stoped, the seal population would skyrocket, and the seals would suffer a great deal. If baby seals were not so cute, this wouldn't be an issue.

Yappa said...

I agree, Bert. There's the issue of an ecosystem that has evolved over hundreds of years. With the current amount of hunting we have huge populations of seals. I don't know if seals are still implicated in declining cod stocks or if that was debunked.

When the anti-fur movement first resulted in a big decrease in hunting in Canada's north, we had an explosion of beaver dams. Again, an ecosystem of beavers and hunters had developed.