| Aww,
baby harp seals are cute.
Too bad they don't know about Canada's spiked club
hunt.
- Mark Morford
Friday, April 7, 2006
©2006 San Francisco
Chronicle 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, a
cherub and a Marshmallow Peep, and tossed him 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 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
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 photograph 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 a 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 gets 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 drunken 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 rethink 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, 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, including insects, 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, serves 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? Mark
Morford's column appears Wednesdays and Fridays in Datebook and on sfgate.com.
E-mail
him at mmorford@sfgate.com. Page
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