Waging the seal war

By Senator Céline Hervieux-Payette, P.C.
Leader of the opposition in the Canadian Senate

What could motivate international organizations to spend thousands of dollars to protect an animal that isn’t threatened? In the face of strong emotions and irrationality, this is a legitimate question.

In fact, this seal war launches a debate - an urgent one in my view - on those organizations, their moral discourse and their vision of man in his natural surroundings.

Let me begin by reiterating four essential points: first, harp seals and hooded seals, which are hunted in Canada, are not threatened - far from it; their population has tripled in thirty years (nearly 6 million head). Second, the hunting of baby seals or "whitecoats" (also called pups or calves) has been prohibited since 1987. Third, slaughtering techniques have been certified as non-cruel by the Canadian Veterinary Medical Association. Fourth, Canada is signatory to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity and, as such, must guarantee the diversity of living species and harvest its resources in a sustainable manner.

It’s as though we citizens of America or Europe, urban residents for the most part, are discovering a basic law that is as old as the planet itself: the human species survives by consuming other living species (animal or vegetable) and prospers by trading on them.

Living in our sanitized cities, we have increasingly become disconnected from this basic reality that humans take the resources they need from their environment. However, let’s not kid ourselves: it was ever thus. Our western lifestyle has reduced the number of resource harvesters to a very small minority, which is nearly invisible to the vast majority of us who benefit from them.

Yes we eat living species to survive. And yes we trade those other living species to prosper.

The arguments put forward by the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) and its allies suggest another moral vision of mankind, whose sectarian and religious nature warrant closer examination. In a paper published in 2005 by the HSUS, “Public Morality and the Canadian Seal Hunt,” Reverend Andrew Linzay wrote, “to point to economic advantage is insufficient as a moral justification.” Also a PhD and member of the theology faculty at Oxford University, Linzay added that, “there is no adequate moral justification for the seal hunt.”

In this new moral order, animals have rights but surprisingly no obligations since, as the Reverend notes, “animals are morally innocent.” The animal’s purity stands in contrast to man, the source of original sin and corruptor of the Garden of Eden. So is it morally acceptable for man to heartlessly kill animals to survive, behaving as an omnipotent would-be creator? “Language about seals as a resource is sub-ethical,” replies Linzay, adding that “instrumentalist views of animals still predominate in the world today."

According to this view, then, it would be blasphemy to suggest that man is superior to animals. Yet the facts are clear: man is a species that has come to dominate all others. This gives man the tremendous responsibility of ensuring the sustainability of living and inert resources while showing sensitivity and compassion. Moreover, man has organized his relationship with fellow creatures in a way that transcends the law of the jungle: the concept of justice is, indeed, unknown in the wild. So we would be wrong to accept this new definition of right and wrong implicitly being put forward by HSUS and its allies. In their opinion, “animals [who] cannot give or withhold their consent, vulnerable and defenceless” are good, while man, who uses his power in a supposedly barbaric way, is bad.

Yet all this information manipulation revolves around the following deception: by claiming to be the defender of species and the environment, HSUS and its allies are carefully avoiding reference to their moral vision of man, while rallying public opinion to their crusade.

Accordingly, the ambiguity of their discourse becomes manifest: when HSUS and its allies talk about protecting seals, they are officially claiming a threat to the species - which is scientifically untenable - while unofficially challenging the right of man in the natural environment to kill animals - in a sustainable manner and without causing suffering - to live, trade and prosper. How else if not by this logic can we explain Brigitte Bardot’s rationale for launching a petition against eating horse meat or for including vegetarianism in the platform of her national party in France on March 24, 2007?

Using the emotionally charged image of the whitecoat seal - emotion being the opposite of reason - when it hasn’t been hunted since 1987, is part of this strategy of manipulating environmental discourse for the purposes of a moralizing ideology.

At the heart of this approach are animal rights supporters, not experts but extremists, who advocate for animals. Their doctrine is supported by an army of volunteers and followers around the world who identify with animals, that is, ordinary people whose sentimentality about animals is carefully nurtured.

This mixture of science and the sacred, of reason and spirituality, is the black hole in this seal war: though invisible, it lies at the heart of it. We may deplore that societies may freely wish to adhere to this vision, yet it remains legitimate. Attempts to impose it, however, are tantamount to a dangerous fanaticism that we must combat with resolve.