The past is prologue

Canada is resuming a large-scale Atlantic seal hunt in what's shaping to be the biggest cull in 50 years, says the BBC for April 12.

Twenty-five years ago, there were protests and boycotts after people were exposed to pictures and film of the brutality of the hunt, which involved clubbing baby seals to death. The resulting crash in the market for sealskin pretty much put an end to it.

The US banned imports of seal products in 1972 and the EU followed suit a decade later with a ban on white pelt imports, taken from the youngest babies.

As a result, the Canadian government reduced quotas for seal hunting to as low as 15,000 annually - mainly for meat and local handicraft.

But with fur again in fashion the hunt is back.

Canada increased the quotas last year, allowing a million seals to be killed over the space of three years.

That's more than a twenty-fold increase.

Of course, there are plenty of government officials eager to explain the environmental and economic beauty of it all.

Canadian Natural Resources Minister John Efford said many claims about the hunt were simply wrong.

He argued that the seal population was exploding - an estimated 5.2 million harp seals in the North Atlantic at present - and commercial fish stocks were vanishing.

These are exactly - and I do mean exactly - the same sort or arguments we heard a quarter of a century ago.

Then, for example, sealers insisted that clubbing was "humane," because the first blow rendered them unconscious, so they felt no pain. That was possibly true for adult seals on dry land, but these were babies - which have extra-thick layers of blubber - on slippery ice foes. The result was that they were usually bludgeoned repeatedly, conscious until they died from blood loss, sometimes even skinned while party conscious.

Interestingly, under the new guidelines, most seals are to be shot instead of clubbed "in a bid to make the killing more humane." That is, to not use precisely the method proclaimed as humane before. (Oh, by the way, why did the sealers prefer to club instead of shoot? Because a pelt with a bullet hole in it wasn't worth as much.)

And again, we're hearing, as we did before, that seals are killing off (by eating) commercial fish stocks. It's really amazing that the fish managed to survive in such healthy numbers all those who knows how many years before sealing started. Lucky for them they've now got us to protect them.

Because it is because of the seals, you know. The fact that marine biologists for years have been consistently sounding alarms about the dangers of overfishing and been almost as consistently ignored has nothing to do with it. It's all because of the seals. Just ask John Efford. Or the next person you see wearing a sealskin coat.

The Canadian tourism commission admitted last week it was keeping an eye open for an international backlash should the protests gather strength.

Yeah, well, I never wanted to go to Nova Scotia anyway. Or Labrador to see L'Anse-aux-Meadows. Or Vancouver. Or..., well, never mind, dammit.