Is Seal Hunt Appall Hypocritical Compared with America's Gluttony for Animal Consumption?

On Friday, April 7, in his San Francisco Chronicle Datebook column, (Pg E1) Mark Morford, challenges readers with an examination of the horror we feel regarding seal slaughter while we support other shocking animal abuse. The piece is headed,

"Aww, baby harp seals are cute. Too bad they don't know about Canada's spiked club hunt."

It opens:
"Let us all agree right now: Baby harp seals -- those doe-eyed sausagelike bundles of puffy white blubber -- are just phenomenally, face-meltingly cute. So adorable and so helpless and so sweet looking, it's like God took Bambi and sawed off all his legs and put him in a white fluffy parka and crossbred him with a puppy, a cherub and a Marshmallow Peep, and tossed him onto the Arctic ice to pose for Polar Baby Gap. I mean, cute.

"But baby seals are also, apparently, highly lucrative. Just ask the Canadian government, taking massive heat from the international animal rights community and Pamela Anderson and just about everybody else for allowing a renewed seal hunt this year, giving rights to seal hunters to slaughter upward of 325,000 megacute baby harp seals (among other related species) out of an estimated seal population of about 6 million.

"Maybe you've seen the nasty scenario: Apparently soulless, stone-hearted men with giant spiked clubs walk straight up to these helpless and staggeringly adorable creatures and smash their soft skulls in one or two massive blows, all for the sake of profit on the seals' fur (expensive leather goods) and a bit of seal oil (rich in omega-3!), despite no real economic necessity. It's just luxury.

"It is easy to be horrified. It is easy to be disgusted and appalled by this senseless and cruel killing, even as you block out the fact that, in America, we kill what, 2 million unwanted dogs and cats per year? Three million? And don't use their meat or fur for anything except some scary medical experiments and perhaps some sort of illegal chicken feed? But, you know, shhh.

"Fact is, we in America butcher animals by the billions to feed and clothe our ever-gluttonous population, countless totally not-at-all-cute chickens and pigs and cows, fish and turkeys and rabbits and sheep, all hacked and clubbed and shot and beheaded by the truckload in a thousand different mechanized techniques and no one really blinking an eye except for rabid animal activists and vegetarians and people who secretly miss wearing leather.

"But then you merely walk up to anyone and mention how we as a species are still brutally beating these adorable white puffball seals with giant spiked clubs, and maybe you show them a photograph and defy anyone but Donald Rumsfeld or Karl Rove to shudder and recoil in abject horror, even as you munch your fresh order of chicken pad Thai. I mean, horrible.

"It's one of those scenarios that raises a decidedly all-American question: Are we all just incredible hypocrites? Have our lives become so complicated and messy and packed with low-grade, everyday hypocrisy across so many levels -- politics, religion, education, sexual mores, etc. -- that we've reached a point where the very notion of hypocrisy becomes flexible and fluid and just another annoying itch we can't quite scratch?"

I will not paste the rest of the column here because the paper probably counts the URL hits, so it will be better for Morford, and for the future of animal issue articles, if you hit this link and read the rest of the article on line:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/04/07/DDGKJI42H51.DTL

It is worth reading. Morford doesn't really answer the question he poses above, but it is refreshing to see it asked in print.


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