Live and let die
Aaron Levere Staff
“There are 2 billion chickens that are being slaughtered. Why is the fuzzy seal photo-op the important one? Why aren’t you down in a slaughter house where cows are being killed or calves are being killed or lambs are being killed or chickens are being killed?”
— Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Danny Williams on Larry King Live March 3
“One of the advantages of being an international celebrity, Larry, is you can get time on a show like yours and discuss these issues. We want to try and present this in a fair way.”
— Sir Paul McCartney on Larry King Live March 3
Sir Paul’s recent appearance on the CNN talkshow was not about discussion or issues, and it was not about fair. As McCartney himself reveals, one of the advantages of being a rock star is that you have ready access to the medium, a fact that any NGO that intends to stay in business must learn to exploit.
As the story goes, Paul and his late wife, Linda, were enjoying a nice rare rack of lamb at a table overlooking a nice little field of frolicking sheeplings. While awaiting more mint sauce, the McCartneys were struck with the profound realization that live lambs sure are cute, and in that instant, they became the most famous vegetarians in the world.
There are many good reasons to be vegetarian. Producing meat uses a gluttonous share of resources, the conditions in factory farms are sadistic, and one potential epidemic after another seems to be the result of packing a lot of sickly, inbred, beef-eating, overdrugged herbivores together in masses of their own shit. Not to mention the sweet smell of incinerating pig’s blood that wafts over our fair city on evenings when the prairie winds blow just so. The meat industry is indefensible.
Hunting, on the other hand, is not comparable. The human element makes hunting fundamentally different.
Not to be confused with certain American politicians who fly in to a duck farm to get drunk and shoot each other, actual hunting requires a lifetime of knowledge. A pig farm can be built anywhere, but hunting is entirely specific to where you live. The skills required are learned from older generations who have lived in that place long enough to know exactly how it is done. This is why it is said that hunting is a way of life. Subsistence hunters are necessarily careful, good shots, and effective, because if they are not, they don’t make a living.
In northern Manitoba, flooding by Manitoba Hydro has laid waste to vast areas of land and water where subsistence fishing and hunting had, until the flooding, been practised since time immemorial. In north-western Ontario, the residents of Grassy Narrows continue the longest logging blockade in history, to prevent further destruction of their treaty-protected trapping grounds and the poisoning of their water and fish with mercury by logging companies based in Quebec or Seattle. Even where it is still possible to hunt and trap, the fur market has been nearly wiped out by international protest by burger-eating cuteness-lovers everywhere. Aboriginal hunters are not usually the main target of fur protests, but they are always negatively affected.
The social problems that follow the destruction of the hunting way of life are the result of the removal of the last viable industry for many people. Land-use decisions made by people in far-away cities have changed the lives (and deaths) of these people drastically for the worse.
Those who actually know something about the land, and how to use it to make a living, are not heard. They do not have access to CNN. Those who know whether or not the techniques used are humane are not asked by reporters or Greenpeace donors in Toronto. In the televised seal-hunting debate between the “townie”politician and the knight in thermal armour, the one voice missing is that of the sealers — the people arguably the most knowledgable and certainly the most affected.
The facts are as follows: sealers don’t have better options and the added income is significant; Paul McCartney is currently worth £1 billion while Newfoundland and Labrador currently has a $473 million deficit; seals die more quickly and in less pain than most other living things will, and there are 5.8 million harp seals in the north Atlantic, as there have been for 30 years.
Paul McCartney and his wife were flown to Charlottetown by two large American animal rights organizations. On air, Danny Williams invited the McCartneys up to Newfoundland to meet with him to discuss the seal hunt. Paul told the worldwide television audience that he, in fact, was already, at that very moment, “here in Newfoundland” while being recorded live from the CBC studio on Prince Edward Island.
Such is the localized information imparted by the McCartneys.
Meanwhile, sealers watched all of this on really nice new TVs in their tiny bedrooms in Fort McMurray, Alberta, hoping the ice will still be thick enough in a few weeks for the hunt to begin, enabling them to finally fly home to work that requires their singular knowledge.
