Comparing seals, lambs misleading
Posted By: Char Olson
Date: Sunday, 4 May 2008, at 11:46 a.m.
Comparing seals, lambs misleading
Times Colonist
Published: Sunday, May 04, 2008
Re: "What about the lamb slaughter?," April 30.
While I do not intend to defend abattoirs, it is completely false and misleading to compare the seal hunt to the slaughter of sheep and cows.
Anyone who ran through a slaughterhouse bashing animals with a hooked club, leaving them to writhe in agony on the floor for minutes before coming back to finish the job, would be charged with cruelty to animals. Yet this is how seals are killed.
Video evidence easily available on the web shows the seal hunt is nothing like the fairly instantaneous killing of cows and sheep in a modern slaughterhouse. The two- to six-week-old creatures flail around in front of their mothers, screaming, blood gushing everywhere. According to independent veterinarians, the seals are occasionally skinned alive.
Even the Department of Fisheries and Oceans now admits that seals are not depleting fish stocks. One hundred years ago, there were untold millions of seals -- about 1,000 per cent more than today -- yet fish stocks were abundant almost beyond imagination. In typical human fashion, we wiped out the fish resource by over-fishing and now try to blame the seals.
I wonder if there is hope for our small-minded, selfish species.
Richard Brunt
Victoria
© Times Colonist (Victoria) 2008
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