Flipper pie, anyone?

The Newfoundland seal hunt officially began today, and I don't feel I can let the moment go unnoticed, especially as I know Paul Watson's ship is on its way to the Grand Banks. Some might say my history makes me biased, but I've thought about this a lot and I think I have a fairly balanced view of the whole situation.

Watson and his Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, along with other groups such as the International Fund for Animal Welfare, are doing everything they can to once again shut down the North Atlantic seal hunt. Didn't they learn anything from the stupidity of Paul McCartney's comments to Rex Murphy last year? I am not exactly a vociferous carnivore, I don't exactly have a lot of fur in my wardrobe, and seeing cruelty of any kind hurts me to the very core of my being, but I do not agree with this effort to stop the hunt.

The debates pro and con the hunt are easily available online. And yes, it can be considered cruel and it is ugly to see. No form of killing, no matter how humanely done, is pretty. What really bothers me, aside from the inaccurate information touted by these organizations—they kill baby seals; it's only for the fur; they skin them alive; they kill them more brutally than necessary......in fact, seal meat is a Newfoundland delicacy; it's been illegal to kill white coats for 20 years; the hakapik and the club look nasty, but kill quickly, and quick is what you want—is the hypocricy.

Paul Watson claims to be upholding international law by his activities, which include ramming sealing ships on the North Atlantic, putting hundreds of lives at serious risk. A few minutes after making this claim in an interview with Shelagh Rogers today, he followed with "I don't really have much respect for the Ministry of Fisheries and Oceans." These would be some of the people making the laws. Hmmm, something isn't quite right here. Watson is breaking international law to stop something that is fully within international law. (Unlike Sea Shepherd's fight against many other kinds of marine hunting, the Canadian seal hunt is fully legal.)

It's not so much that I am pro sealing; I'm just not violenty opposed to it. And I do adore seals. It's just that I see this issue as an easy target. Hunting seals on the ice provides vivid imagery. They are furry and cute, even after their coats turn grey. Red blood shed on white snow makes a striking picture. The cries of seals sound eerie against the silence of the north. It is exactly because we can see all this that we are bothered by it. And we should be bothered by it. The killing of living beings, regardless of how humanely it is done or for what purpose, should never be taken lightly.

My question to people who oppose the hunt is this: Have you ever eaten meat that came from the supermarket, a fast food outlet, or pretty much anywhere other than your own farm? If you answer yes, I don't think you have the moral right to oppose the seal hunt. The atrocities that occur in CAFOs and industrial slaughterhouses are well documented by journalists and authors from Upton Sinclair's The Jungle (1906) to Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma (2006).

Our food system is wrought with problems, particularly in the way we produce and process animals. The success of this system is dependent on people's ignorance of what is really going on. It would take a hardened soul to visit a CAFO and slaughterhouse and immediately after sit down with a burger. But we buy our meat ready-cooked, or on nice little styrofoam trays at the supermarket. We no longer even need to visit the butcher, where evidence of the fact that we are consuming flesh is still evident, even if hidden behind the plastic curtain. Whether it is meat, organic spray cans of pancake mix, or so-called organic lettuce, we are disconnected from our food sources and rarely know where it has come from, how it got here, or even what's really in it (who can understand the ingredient lists on most foods without a chemistry degree?).

And so we see the brutal reality of the seal hunt, and naturally it stirs feelings of disgust and remorse. If we could see the brutality or absurdity of many of the other foods we eat, wouldn't we have the same reaction? I think so. Aside from meat, our carefully constructed processed food products systematically remove any remnants of nature or real food from the things we eat. We rape the land of its fertility by growing crops in huge chemical-dependent monocultures. We allow rural communities to decay because small farmers can't squeak out a living growing real food. We use huge amounts of oil shipping food back and forth across the globe in the name of efficiency, even those foods that we can grow locally.

In the end, I think the debate over whether the seal hunt
is or isn't excessively cruel is irrelevant. (Never mind issues of cultural heritage, disappearing cod stocks, attacks on fisherman, slander of the Newfoundland people, and so on.) The sanctioned violence in the mainstream industrial food system far outweighs anything that happens on an ice floe a few weeks each year. The social and ecological violence caused by industrial farming, processing, and long distance transport is massive, but how can it ever compete with those big brown eyes* looking into the barrel of a rifle?

*And why do they always show pictures of the whitecoats, which are not part of the hunt? If they have a legitimate issue, they shouldn't have to stretch the truth to get support.