A full-length documentary on the seal hunt in Canada, that you need to put on your watchlist.
It explores in detail the ethics, how the seals are killed, bled, butchered, cooked and eaten, a little bit of history, how communities of Inuits and descendants of French colonizers alike could never have survived there without the seal hunt.
They of course speak with and show PeTA (wow that guy is a real nutjob - he has a high position within PeTA and he says killing animals is wrong?! And he just sounds like a corrupt business monkey who knows nothing of the real world), IFAW, and they of course bring up our “dear” Paul Watson of Sea Shepherd (or “the SS”), though he isn’t interviewed.
And the big point towards the end is that while the EU has banned all commercial/industrial trade of seal products, they say “oh but traditional sustenance hunting by the Inuits is fine” and the Inuits DON’T like this. Because as they say, “we don’t live in igloos anymore”, and the seals are their main source of income. They can’t just eat and wear the animals personally, they have to sell them too.
The hunt is legal, but the market has been shut down almost everywhere, especially the EU-wide ban was a really heavy hit. And it’s not like the EU has some moral high horse to sit on, when our animals are still being treated like this (supposedly all filmed in Belgium, in the heart and capital of the EU).
The people living there, up north in Canada, are the poorest people in Canada, with the highest costs of living (check out the common food items costing six times more what you or I are used to, it’s in the film), and the highest unemployment. They live off of selling products like seal fur, but can hardly sell any today, partly because of trade bans, partly because of AR propaganda.
Children are starving and not getting food every day, because of these irrational bans pushed by AR organizations, who openly admit the cute seal face is a really good image to make money off of.
The difference is one side wants to make money for pure survival, the other wants to stuff their already fat bank accounts and buy a second summer home.
I came into this film with no strong emotions, but pretty much thinking the AR mindset is bullshit on this, the animals are being killed humanely, and I already knew killing tiny pups only for fur was illegal, so they are killing bigger seals (I was pretty confused by the very tiny carcasses though, they are not killing white-pelted animals, but the seals are still very small and young).
That you can’t judge an animal’s worth on its cute-factor. And since I no longer oppose either the Grind in the Faroes or the dolphin hunt in Taiji (because Taiji has evolved its practices, and the Grind was never really cruel), I thought I can’t imagine any reason I’ll oppose the seal hunt either.
And I came out of the film thinking pretty much the same thing, just knowing more details. IFAW in the film brought up (and showed us, filmed by them from helicopter) some seals being shot several times before they’re dead, and I agree that’s a problem, but unfortunately these mistakes happen in every hunt and slaughter practice. They didn’t tell us how often it happens, if it’s one of four animals, one of ten, or one of a thousand.
I think especially striking was a segment, quotes by two people, about the welfare and horror aspect of the killing and butchering itself.
“I understand people’s response to the sight of a dying seal on a white ice pan. It’s a very upsetting thing to see. When brain death happens, the seal is doing the wimp-swim reflex. A veterinarian will look at that and go “Okay, this is good animal welfare. Oh there’s lots of blood, the animal is bleeding out quickly. That’s good animal welfare.” But for the rest of us, we see an animal struggling for its life, in extraordinary pain. That’s not what’s actually happening.”
“You know the concept of a chicken with its head cut off? It’s a reflex action, the animal is dead. But if you take that image, edit it nicely, and show it to a bunch of people who don’t know any different, it looks like the animal is still alive. So all this stuff is just pure malarkey. Aimed at convincing people who don’t know any better, urbanites who have no concept of where their food comes from, whether it’s a roast beef dinner or a seal dinner.”