Who Loves Baby-Seal Kabobs?

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Mark Morford: Who Loves Baby-Seal Kabobs?

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Fri, 7 Apr 2006 01:22 -0700

 

 

 

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Who Loves Baby-Seal Kabobs?

It's another shockingly brutal Canadian seal slaughter. How appalled

should you be?

 

- By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist

Friday, April 7, 2006

 

 

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 and a cherub and a

Marshmallow Peep and tossed him out 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 step out onto the ice and

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 at all

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 picture exactly like this

one, 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 point where the very notion of hypocrisy

becomes flexible and fluid and just another annoying itch we can't

quite scratch?

 

More specifically, is some sort of moral or humane line being crossed

with the seals that isn't really crossed with, say, the slaughter of

ducks? Is it the primitive, barbaric technique of the seal killings

that get to us? Or the stunning baby-seal cuteness? Is it the fact

that most harp seals are helpless babies and that we're chemically

hardwired to want to protect innocent defenseless infants? Is this the

overarching message? Take the cows, but don't slaughter swooning cuteness?

 

Of course, no one except drunk hunters and Dick Cheney wants to see

animals suffer. No one, even happy carnivores, wants to see inside a

real slaughterhouse. To see the sausage get made, most agree, is to

re-think your relationship to meat and the animal kingdom and to be

brutally stunned into lifelong vegetarianism if not an absolute

rejection of kick-ass leather boots and cool wallets. This, of course,

is what the animal rights groups count on.

 

Which is exactly why the Canadian baby-seal slaughter is, it must be

said, the perfect press op for PETA et al. Next to grotesque Japanese

whaling, baby-seal slaughter is the ideal gruesome PR spectacle.

Naturally, PETA and its ilk oppose all forms of animal use, from

Chicken McNuggets to leather gloves to bunny paté, but those issues

lack the flash and power and sheer visceral horror of smashing cute

baby seals. By trotting out pneumatic super-intellect Pamela Anderson

to offer lap dances to Canadian PM Stephen Harper if he'll just

reconsider the seal hunt, they're merely leveraging this intense

cuteness/brutality dichotomy to raise awareness of all the others.

Easy enough.

 

But then again, not really. Truth is, the seal slaughter does less to

increase awareness of all animal cruelty and far more to illuminate

the question of just where we draw our lines of allowable consumption.

It is modern moral relativism, a question of where the hell you think

you reside on the grand karmic spectrum of Who Decides What Lives or Dies.

 

Do you eat all sorts of meat and love leather couches and cool

sheepskin boots and think nothing of it? That slippery line is way,

way over there, not all that relevant to your life. Eat only organic,

free-range meats, humanely treated and killed? The line moves a little

closer, the question becomes more immediate. Vegetarian? Closer still.

Vegan, it's right under your nose. Monastic mendicant Jainist who

believes in harming absolutely no life whatsoever and that includes

insects and worms and even Ashlee Simpson, to the point where you

won't blink an eye for fear of killing one of those creepy little

microscopic mites that live in your eyelashes? The line dissolves

completely.

 

Yes, the seal slaughter is barbaric and stupid. Then again, we could

all survive without chicken and veal and leather jackets and steaming

delicious organic turkey hot dogs, too. If we are to measure the

progress of the human species by how many things we remove from the

master list of Things We Kill Because We Can, well, we have progressed

nearly not at all.

 

Perhaps it all has to do with trying to have, at the very least, a

modicum of conscience, a shred of reverence, a hint of respect for the

creatures we consume for meat or oil or pelt. Respect the

interconnectedness of all things, even as you consume them. Especially

as you consume them. And there's a visceral level of barbarism and

cruelty attached to baby-seal hunts that, like whaling, serve no

justifiable purpose and obliterates any sort of consciousness,

compassion or ritual. It is merely slaughter for money.

 

Is this our collective line? Is our abject disgust at the seal hunt a

sign of enlightenment and progress? Or is it merely that the damnable

creatures are so unbelievably cute that they release gobs of oxytocin

in our brains and we want to love and protect them like tiny Dalmatian

puppies even as we enjoy our Niman Ranch hamburgers?

 

Which is it, deep morality or visceral cuteness? Can you unpack it

all? Do the seals even care?

Thoughts for the author? E-mail him.

mmorford