Canada's seal hunt draws protests and boycotts
Barbara Yaffe
Vancouver Sun
Tuesday, March 15, 2005
Ottawa cares about people who vote, pay taxes and make political donations. So it has no particular reason to fret about animals, which of course do none of the above.
Last week, David Lane, an Edmonton man now living in Coquitlam, was charged with animal cruelty. He was charged after the Edmonton Humane Society viewed a video of a young man presumably beating or crushing the head of a cat. Details aren't known because police haven't released the video.
In B.C., the SPCA has just charged a Likely couple, owners of Big Dog Rescue, with cruelty to animals after a raid in which it found dozens of sick, emaciated dogs in Beth and Charles Bulter's care.
If guilt is established in either case, penalties will be minimal because the Martin government, to its great discredit, has failed to update 122-year old legislation on animal cruelty.
The necessary deterrent simply isn't there in the existing law, which considers animals "property."
Justice Minister Irwin Cotler said last fall he's "absolutely committed" to updated legislation which the Liberals have been trying to get through Parliament for the past six years.
Yet to date, Cotler has done zip to reinvigorate the bill. Keep in mind, it took three days for MPs and senators to vote themselves huge pay raises in 2001.
To be sure, animal welfare isn't a priority for everyone. Indeed, some disdain efforts expended on animals when globally so many human beings are in such dire straits.
But compassion toward living creatures isn't a zero-sum game. Who among us can know whether this or that species feels pain or has capacity for emotion?
If you are someone who cares about animals, you're likely aware of protests at Canadian embassies and consulates today in 20 cities around the world -- in support of ending yet one more form of animal cruelty, the seal hunt.
A protest is set for Fisheries and Oceans offices in Vancouver.
Why shed tears for seals when, every day of the week, we package chickens, pigs and cows into breasts, thighs, chops and such? Slaughtering and butchering are never pretty.
Well, the point here is that sealing takes place in offshore locations and the regulatory oversight that normally exists in urban and rural slaughterhouses is impossible to replicate on ice floes. Inevitably, some hunters take advantage.
The International Fund for Animal Welfare, which closely monitors the hunt off Newfoundland and around the Gulf of St. Lawrence, photographs proceedings, and offers visual proof of stomach-churning abuses to all who care to look.
We're talking skinning seals alive; or shooting them and missing the precise killing spot so the seals writhe in pain until the hunter finally gets around to an up-close blast.
Fisheries and Oceans, on its website, rejects IFAW assertions, citing an after-death reflex in seals.
It also contends baby seals are no longer hunted, neglecting to mention that bureaucrats consider the mammals as adults once they shed their white coats, 12 days after birth.
Further, DFO considers the spiked club known as the hakapik a humane killing tool and insists the hunt is "closely monitored and tightly regulated," from patrol planes, vessels and at dockside. About five sealers a year are convicted of inhumane practices.
DFO believes seal populations are healthy and the hunt is sustainable, though Ottawa's record on stock management is questionable, based on the collapse of the cod fishery.
The hunt yields fur pelts, meat and seal oils -- which translated last year into $16 million for Canadians.
Meanwhile, Canada exports more than $3 billion worth of seafood annually to the U.S. alone. And humane societies in the U.S. and Europe are now protesting the seal slaughter by launching a boycott of Canadian seafood starting with today's protests.
Sadly, it looks like this fight will come down to cold cash rather than compassion.
byaffe@png.canwest.com
© The Vancouver Sun 2005