Much Ado About Clubbing

It happens every year at the end of winter. As the ice starts to show signs of breaking and the first hints of spring arrive in the air, the activists show up to protest the seal hunt. And every year, the hunt goes ahead anyway. There's anger and rhetoric, condemnation and accusations, threats and arrests and of course calls for boycotts until the hunt is over and everyone goes home (depending on court dates) and gets ready for next year.

This year has been different. For starters, not everyone will be going home. Four sealers died when their boat overturned while being towed by the Coast Guard. Just last week two boats sank in separate incidents, thankfully with no serious injuries. The seal hunt has never been a particular safe activity, but this year has been uncommonly challenging. Now there is a proposal to ban the hakapik — the pointed club pictured above — that could actually make things worse for the hunters. After all, if you happen to fall through the ice, what's better to pull yourself out than a pointed club?

It's been challenging for the protestors as well. It is an annual tradition that Paul Watson's Sea Shepherd Conversation Society shows up and attempts to disrupt the hunt. This year there was a collision between their vessel and a Canadian Coast Guard ship, and ultimately the Sea Shepherd vessel was impounded and the captain and first officer arrested. This was after they had their lines cut and were otherwise made unwelcome in the French territory St. Pierre-Miquelon.

It was also after Watson made possibly the most foolish remark anyone has ever said in regards to the seal hunt. He described the aforementioned deaths of four sealers as not as great a tragedy as the slaughter of thousands of young seals.

That's right, apparently four human lives are worth less to Mr. Watson than an unspecified number of seal pups. Unfortunately, after reading up on some of his previous statements, this comment isn't as shocking as it should be — he apparently has described the human race as a virus, would like to see the world's human population reduced to one billion, and has said that only those who are completely dedicated to environmental causes should have children. With beliefs like that, he's one atomic death ray short of being a James Bond movie villain.

He's hardly the only opponent of the hunt with stupid things to say, however. Last week Toronto Sun columnist Peter Worthington made comparisons between seal hunters and Nazis, as well as making such enlightened statements as "no real hunter is a killer." Apparently waiting in a duck blind for an hour before blasting an unfortunate mallard with a 12 gauge is somehow a more noble activity.

Sadly, that's not even the least intelligent comment Worthington makes in that column. He suggests that after a long, arduous winter, those who hunt seals are doing it to blow off some steam, and it's more about hanging out with the guys than it is any sort of economic necessity.

Actually, it doesn't take a lot of looking to find a certain regionalism in opposition to the seal hunt. By and large, people who live in eastern Canada, and by that I mean the thousand or so miles of Canada east of Ontario, are in favour, while most of the opposition comes from Ontario and farther west, and of course from the US. The idea that people actually make their living on the seal hunt seems loathsome to many anti-hunt activists. There are some who make the simpleminded suggestion that if that is the only employment people can find in rural Newfoundland or the Iles de la Madeleine, they should move to larger centres.

As that argument suggests, there's not a lot of rationality or reasonability in opposition to the seal hunt. Those who are opposed are staunchly opposed, and convincing them to think differently is most likely impossible. The latest development to that end, the proposed ban of the hakapik is a move to improve the optics of the hunt. Granted, the hakapik is only used to kill maybe 10% of seals harvested annually, but it has become a rather inaccurate symbol of the hunt, much like those pictures of furry white newborn seals (which haven't been hunted in more than two decades). The notion that hunters use hakapiks to bludgeon seals to death in a horribly cruel manner is part of the emotional reaction that anti-hunt activists want to provoke.

Ultimately, a hakapik is probably just as humane as a bullet from a rifle, it just looks worse. Banning it will likely change nothing. Seals will still be hunted, and those who are opposed will still oppose it just as loudly. Frankly, the hunters could go out on the ice flows and tickle the seals to death with feather dusters, and people would still protest. Banning the hakapik would be perceived as a step towards ending the hunt entirely, and likely only embolden them to protest more. And the last thing we need to do is encourage nutcases like Paul Watson.