Seal opinion ‘cruel irony’
Published: April 09, 2009 6:00 PM
Updated: April 11, 2009 12:27 AM
Dear editor,
K.E. Brown, in his/her letter, “There’s no atrocity in hunting seals” (Record, April 3), is not seriously, reasonably, contending that animal rights groups are responsible for the failure of the East Coast fishery, is s/he?
It is a strange kind of reasoning applied by Brown to point out that the seal slaughter is not an atrocity because it is legal and then cite the “atrocity” of abortion that is tax-funded (i.e. legal). That an activity is legal does not make it necessarily moral.
It is also a cruel irony that Brown uses the platform of the slaughter of baby seals to refer to the issue of the termination of human fetuses. Brown is not expressing empathy but a desire to control what women do with their bodies.
That Brown apparently cannot fathom an issue from the perspective of compassion does not invalidate that perspective.
Trotting out all the pro-hunt rationales is not an innovative approach. Brown has obviously not delved sufficiently into the seal slaughter arena to realize that there are very good arguments refuting the “science” or other rationale(s) put forward to ensure the continuance of the seal hunt. (By the by, one fact not disputed by even the government, is that the seal hunt is subsidized with our tax dollars; it is not a money-making enterprise.)
Over all the years of the hunt, although the government has tried very hard to ensure that no one sees, films, or gets near the hunt, film footage has made it to the public eye and has invoked horror at the cruelty. The footage viewed in Europe is denied to us.
Our media is so biased in favour of the hunt that Canadians don’t have a clue about what is going on in Europe, how many millions protest against our seal hunt.
The average Canadian, like K.E. Brown, knows next to nothing about the hunt except what we are fed by our biased media.
Pat Newson,
Comox
http://www.bclocalnews.com/vancouver_island_north/comoxvalleyrecord/opinion/42841992.html