So, since I was feeling frisky, and since Andy and I have been conversing on Animal Rights, lately, I sent him a foreward of a petition from a newsgroup I belong to, protesting the renewed seal hunting industry in Canada. Andy responded by quoting a news source he discovered which quoted the CVR, that the Canadian seal hunt is no more inhumane than any other form of commercial slaughter.
Well, damn. That’s true. The words “commercial slaughter” really caught me. I mean, I’ve never seen a commercial slaughterhouse in person – I’ve just seen a few select photos from AR groups. I’ve read a few accounts from eyewitnesses. I currently work in a factory and I’ve spent a decade in foodservice, so for me, the tempo of sales meets a viscereal knife-wielding on-demand version of hell, gets all mixed up with a misbegotten variant of the protestant work ethic in which the poor are poor because they haven’t quite placed the right em-phas-is on the heaving of their bootstraps and voila, you have a thumbnail sketch of the modern meatpacking industry – Henry Miller’s Ninth Circle of Hell plus entrails, right?
What got to me was the equation. Place the Canadian seal hunt side by side with cows being marched into a slaughterhouse. Place the bloodied tidal aftermath of this incident I’m concerned with beside the lagoons of any NC pig farm. Where’s the extra concern stem from? Truth be told, I couldn’t place it.
There is something extraordinarily bothersome to me in the notion that the animals which are being hunted are being hunted across territory over which they are extremely vulnerable – seals are sea mammals and do not move adeptly on ice or land. They are being hunted, quite deliberately, right after the birthing season, during which a great majority of them will be rooted and immobile. The real focus of these hunts are the young newborn pups, if, legally, they must now be 25 days or older. My instinctive association is that this whole event reeks of walrus hunting in the Arctic, which has been likened to lampooning frigidaires (for all the skill it involves) and the mass slaughter of bison in the American West in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which extinguished the species as a whole and ruined the native populaces dependent upon them. Seal hunting is different, of course, because there are quotas involved.
Still, I couldn’t let go of that likening. What of captive bred minks? How about those mad cows? I realized, this morning, that Andy may have missed a very good point – the seal hunt in Canada could very well be described as more humane than your average commercial slaughter experience.
After all, the seals, as a whole, live their entire lives in the wilds of Canada, free of cages. Captive bred fur animals spend their whole lives in containers so small they can do little else aside from turn around. The parasites which plague them, in their en masse confinement, tend to make them so irritable, they do little else besides turn in circles, in place, for their whole lives – that’s several years. Some of them develop skin conditions so intolerable, they gnaw their own flesh down to tendon and bone. After this, if they are lucky, they are anally electrocuted. If they are unlucky, that is, they were raised for fur in China, they have their backs inexpertly broken – many of these animals are merely stunned and fully conscious while they are skinned alive.
Andy was bothered by the notion that some AR groups have placed photos of whitecoat seals on their websites, even though the hunting of these particular newborns was made illegal several years ago. I was more intrigued by one particular phrase – that the seal hunt is no more cruel than any other form of commercial slaughter, where cameras are normally not allowed.
This, after all, is the phrase which speaks volumes. The suspension of the Canadian seal hunts in the late 80’s was paved, primarily, due to it’s gruesome images, images which spoke louder than ideology, even the pragmatic ideology in which we normally take comfort “These are creatures which are natural resources, which are going to die, somehow, anyway.”
And yet, when confronted with what “natural resources” truly means, many of us were turned off, nauseated, made adament, protesting and refusatory, even.
And yet, those images were the kinder ones. Friendly seal pups being bludgeoned over the head with clubs over open territory across which they are defenseless? Those would be the rated G version of what’s going on in the commercial slaughtering industry.
When we can take this reality and say “This is the better, kinder, free-range version” it doesn’t belittle the concern for seals. It should highlight the concern underlying our use of the words “commercial slaughter” and what it means to be alive and in possession of an appetite.
