Seal Hunting- an inhumane crime against nature
Canada leads a hunt that is one of the most inhumane hunts ever designed to serve a purpose that is not at all necessary for the existence of humans. It is a cruel and unethical practice which produces - out of helpless marine creatures - products nobody essentially needs.
Surely you readers may be blanching at the idea that harmless sea creatures are being killed every year just for the sake of their fur and – that’s right - fashion.
Honestly, in this day and age, animals shouldn't need to be removed from the planet in the name of fashion. These sweet natured creatures are no different from a puppy you keep at home.
What am I talking about, you might be asking?
I’m talking about the largest deliberate slaughter of marine mammals in the world - Canada’s seal hunt.
In fact, 98% of the animals killed in the past two years were seal pups aged about 2 weeks to 3 months. And about 96% of the seals killed will be less than three months old and more than 40% may be skinned alive!
In Canada, the season for the commercial hunt of the harp seal is from November 15 to May 15. Most sealing occurs in late March in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and during the first or second week of April, off Newfoundland, in an area known as "The Front."
The seal hunt involves thousands of sealers, or seal hunters, competing for a limited number of seals during a short period of time. Sealers are concerned with clubbing or shooting as many animals as quickly as possible instead of checking to see if a seal is dead before moving on to club or shoot the next one. Horrendous, isn’t it?
Usually, a sealer will use a hakapik or club if at all possible. With these weapons, it's much easier to aim a blow directly at the seal pup's head – a single swing from ahakapik will usually kill a pup right away. By Canadian law, you have to keep clubbing the seal in the forehead until you know for sure that it's dead. Sealers are supposed to perform the "blink-reflex" test, which contains touching the seal's eyeball—if it blinks, you've got to club it again. They also have to "palpate" a pup's cranium after they've clubbed it, to feel the caved-in bone of the skull beneath the skin and blubber.
Few sealers actually perform these tests, though. Some seals are still skinned before being rendered fully unconscious and few sealers are observed checking for a blinking reflex to confirm brain death prior to skinning an animal. Hunt observers encounter seals that have been clubbed and left to suffer on the ice, bleeding profusely, crying, breathing and attempting to crawl. These are not “reflexes”, certainly. This is suffering.
Observers also have reported abuses such as the hooking and dragging of live, hemorrhaging seals across the ice and seals clubbed or shot and left to suffer on the ice. Although all recent veterinary reports recommend reducing the suffering of seals, their recommendations have not been fully implemented. There is no doubt that Canada’s commercial seal hunt continues to result in significant and inadmissible tribulation. Severe cruelty has been witnessed and documented at the hunt during the past 30 years and incidents of cruelty are not decreasing.
Generally, the sufferings that the seals have to endure are due to the rush of the competition between seal hunters. They do not bother to check for reflexes as the hunters rush to immobilize as many baby seals as possible in the short time available to them.
This hunt is a highly competitive activity, carried out over an extensive area, and under very unpredictable conditions. Haste is the rule – and a very bad thing it is, too, that it had to be one.
Commercial sealing is not only conducted in Canada, though. In the world, only four other nations allow it: Greenland, Namibia, Russia and Norway.
It has been banned in all other countries, such as the United States, which had been heavily involved in the sealing industry, has now legally prohibited the commercial hunting of marine mammals. In reality, this hunt only continues to exist because it is propped up by a range of government subsidies and tax-payers money. More and more countries around the world are adopting legislation to ban the import of seal products.
Even celebrities are against the killing of seals; Pamela Anderson, Paul McCartney and many other celebrities disapprove of these barbaric ways. Paris Hilton herself, one of the many fashionistas of our trend-setting world, has protested against seal hunting.
There is another factor the Canadian government is ignoring. The government is on record stating it will take ‘real action’ on global warming, that it will take stringent measures to curb global warming.
And yet, they’ve ignored this one thing.
Despite the potentially devastating effects of global warming to harp seal breeding grounds, the Canadian government has raised the annual seal hunt quotas to the highest levels in history. It’s obvious that the effect of global warming will have deleterious ill effects to harp seal breeding grounds - yet in spite of this, the Canadian Govt. has still raised the quotas to the maximum. More over, what exactly are we getting from all this?
What are we obtaining by murdering thousands and thousands of these gentle creatures every year?
We get nothing from this. At least, nothing that counts. Yes, there’s ‘fashion’, but I do not believe that is a good enough reason to kill something.
Seal meat sales are not going as well for Canada, either. Seal meat is generally considered to be inedible and unfit for human consumption. There is a small market in Newfoundland for the seal flippers (for seal flipper pie). But most of the rest of the very small amount of meat found in the slaughtered seal, if utilized at all, would be purchased by pet food and fur farm industries.
This makes the whole ‘killing-seals-for-useful-products’ thing kind of lame, obviously. And very, very pointless.
In 2004, only Taiwan and South Korea purchased seal meat!
Slaughtering of seals is a very unkind human practice having almost no economic gain for the government as seal flesh is hardly desired in other countries.
And in 2006, 325,000 harp seals, as well as 10,000 hooded seals and 10,400 grey seals were killed – even that fact didn’t move them. Sealers continue to kill.
What I’d like to tell them sealers is that if they feel like killing, they should go to terrorist countries and see how brave they would be when they’d have someone facing them with a weapon, not just a poor defenseless, beautiful animal.
Now, in Russia, there are plans for the 2009 season for seal hunting. This is exactly the reason why we should start spreading a movement against this cruel slaughtering of seals.
Man is the only known animal in this planet that kills the other animals for the sake of pleasure. Hence, we should take a vow to initiate a movement to stop the incredulous, yet maddeningly true, crime against these innocent animals.
Let us take a stand - be more civilized to allow the co-existence of man with the less privileged other beings of Mother Earth.
I hope, eventually, we’re going to work towards the ideal kind of life… the kind of life that allows other beings to live in the same world as we do without endangering them.
Just recently, I myself had taken a trip to Dubai Mall and witnessed seal pups at Discovery Center. Watching those graceful creatures swimming about in a large glass tank, spraying the inside of it with freckles of water droplets, I realized completely – my subconscious mind and the inert part of head, too - that there really isn’t any justice in the world.
Like I said before, these gentle-natured creatures are no different than a puppy you rear at home.
Would we kill our harmless little puppies?
By Neeraja Raj, Grade XI B