With Canada hosting the winter Olympics, their infamous seal hunt is all over the news. It’s hard not to be kind of sick at the thought of hundreds of thousands (this year, 400,000 will be sanctioned) of baby seals being clubbed over the head or shot, and it’s easy to hate Canadian laws that support this cruelty.
That said, it’s a commercial venture, regulated by the government to maintain the seal population. It’s illegal to hunt newborns, and people have been hunting seals for 4,000 years. Would this be like us telling our native tribal predecessors that they couldn’t hunt buffalo? (It should be noted that native Inuit hunting only makes up about 3% of today’s seal hunting.)
And like Louis CK says, why are we outraged over one animal and not the other? Why would we eat tuna but then cry foul over dolphin slaughter? For that matter, why is it okay to eat a cow but not your dog?
Many countries have outlawed the practice–as well as the import of seals harvested through these measures. It’s certainly a brutal hunt; most seals are shot, sometimes multiple times, but do not die, causing the hunter to beat them with a club until they are dead. (Could you imagine a deer hunter doing the same? It’s just kind of a ridiculous image to have in your head.) But does brutal make it wrong?
Should Canada cave in to the international pressure it’s being given over the seal hunt? Should it perhaps increase regulations on how the seals are killed and mandate a more humane method? Or should the seal hunt proceed as usual?
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