Apparently the seal hunt is super cruel, so cruel the EU had to ban the importation of seal products. Apparently it is inhumane to murder seals and eat their meat and use their fur and oil. That is probably true. But it's also pretty rude that we keep millions of cows and chickens and pigs in terrible conditions and kill them and then eat their meat and use their skins. Seals at least live outside and get to do seal things; domestic animals mostly live inside and don't get to perform their normal behaviours. I don't need to get into debeaking or mulesing or any of the other awful practices done to animals kept in captivity for the purposes of keeping them docile and immobile; the videos and documents are already out there for anyone who cares to look for them. I think we can all acknowledge that humans don't have a great track record with animals, unless that animal looks adorable on the front page of the paper.
Look, I am no paragon of virtue. But I believe that if you are unprepared to deal with the way your food lived and died, you don't deserve to eat it. The opportunity has not yet arisen, but I would certainly eat venison, because before it became meat, that deer lived outside and did deer stuff until it was killed, hopefully cleanly and with as little suffering as possible. I am not a vegetarian because I believe it's wrong to eat meat; we are an omnivorous species and meat has a lot of nutrients in it; nutrients difficult to derive from plants. Grazing cattle used to be a way to turn grass, which humans can't eat, into beef, which humans can eat. It's not wrong to raise cows in a field; wild cows and domestic cows alike wander around eating grass as part of their normal daily lives. But cows aren't meant to be raised in confined spaces, fed on grain and slaughtered under stressful conditions. It's not ecologically efficient - humans can eat grain; feeding it to cows and then eating the cows produces only 10% of the same food energy as humans eating those grains directly - it's terrible for the cows' quality of life, and it affects the health and taste of the beef - stress hormones and antibiotics are FUCKING UP YOUR STEAK. If I cannot appeal to you on the grounds of animal welfare or human decency or the environment, let me appeal to you on the basis of flavour - COWS TASTE BETTER WHEN THEIR LIVES AND DEATHS DON'T SUCK.
It's that simple. Instead, we waste time weeping over seal pups, because they have cute faces and the image of red blood on white snow is much more visually shocking than the image of red blood on a dirty abattoir floor. Anyone interested in protesting the deaths of harp seals (which, for the record, are not endangered, and whose hunts are controlled by strict quotas from Fisheries and Oceans Canada, a government body staffed by scientists, not economists) should start with the real culprit - global warming. Seal pups are born on ice floes; when the ice is thin or soft, the pups are set adrift in the ocean before they learn to swim, and they drown. Interestingly enough, the largest contributor to the production of greenhouse gases and subsequent global warming, larger even than the transport sector, is livestock.
Anyway, don't listen to me, I'm just an anonymous Internet blowhard. But maybe listen to Jacques Cousteau, who was probably pretty qualified to talk about oceans and what lives in them:
"We have to be logical. We have to aim our activity first to the endangered species. Those who are moved by the plight of the harp seal could also be moved by the plight of the pig – the way they are slaughtered is horrible."
