OT: OUTRAGED! River of Blood
With all the problems in the world, here’s why you should be concerned about Canada’s biggest baby seal hunt in 50 years
WEB-EXCLUSIVE COMMENTARY
By Patti Davis
Newsweek
Updated: 4:24 p.m. ET April 6, 2005
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April 6 - While we mourn the pope's passing, and celebrate the life he lived, our attention is naturally turned inward to our hearts. We ruminate on compassion, on making the world a kinder place. It seems to me that in this time more than any other, we have room in our hearts to consider a terrible cruelty occurring on the ice floes of Canada.
The last days of March meant the last gruesome moments for tens of thousands of baby harp seals. If you traveled to the ice floes of Newfoundland right now, and for the coming weeks, you would be wading through a river of blood. You would see small harp seal cubs, two weeks old, clubbed to death—or sometimes not to death. Animal-rights activists—who seem to be fighting a losing battle—report seeing babies crawling, struggling after being clubbed. One person reported finding a baby, clubbed but not killed, who had managed to crawl away only to die beneath the ice.
Seventy boats brought hundreds of seal hunters to these ice floes in the first bloody days. And this year they are allowed to kill more than 320,000 seal pups, the largest number in 50 years. By the end of the first day, the estimate of dead seal pups was 15,000. Photographs show, and activists have reported, that the ice flows are awash in blood, littered with bodies.
I am old enough to remember clearly the outrage in the ‘60s when photographs of baby seals being clubbed to death were released in this country. The outrage did some good; the trade in seal pelts went into decline. But since then the Canadian government has continued to increase the quota of seal pups allowed to be killed in this gruesome manner—1 million pups in three years, the biggest quota since 1957.
Harp seal pups are fed for two weeks by their mothers before being sent out to the ice alone to fend for themselves. They are unable to swim at that age and are called “beaters” because they beat the water with their flippers to stay afloat. They have no way to escape the men with clubs.
The reason for this increased slaughter is a new appetite, particularly in Europe, for belts, handbags and coats made from seal pups. Norway is reportedly a big market for these items.
How have we allowed this barbarism to increase? Are we so numb that we don’t care anymore about hundreds of thousands of innocent animals who did nothing but be born? If most of us rounded a corner on a highway and saw a slaughter like this, we would call the police, we would scream until our throats gave out, we would probably charge the men with clubs. We wouldn’t say, “I’d do something, but there are so many other problems in the world …” The fact that it’s taking place in Canada doesn’t remove our responsibility. We made a difference once. Our horror, our outrage registered with the Canadian government.
Sadly, and poignantly, the Canadian government has counted on the world doing nothing. And so far they’re right.
Geoff Regan, the fisheries and oceans minister for the Canadian government, has said he is ignoring the seal hunt protests and in fact hopes the hunt will expand. In a London newspaper, he was quoted as accusing animal-rights groups of using the images of the slaughter “to pull at people’s heartstrings.” Since he apparently has no heart, it makes sense that he would find the images of small white baby seals being clubbed to death perfectly acceptable.
There is some sign that the Canadian government is not entirely immune to criticism. They put out a fact sheet for journalists defending the seal hunt. With everything else that’s going on in the world, we can find room in our hearts for young animals—babies—who have no means of escape when men with clubs stride across the ice to kill them so that their pelts can be made into purses and belts.
Compassion always trumps greed. It is the ultimate and final power in the world.
Davis, the daughter of Nancy and Ronald Reagan, is a writer based in Los Angeles
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