Is it wrong to kill cute animals, for food and clothing?

[Caydr]

Caring about something and trying to impose your own views are two different things. This is especially true when the only exposure the person in question's had to seal hunting is propaganda from "save the [animal]s!" web sites.

Do I think that paying people the equivalent of a few cents an hour is wrong? Sure. Do I realize that, if tomorrow China implemented a $10 an hour minimum wage the world's economy would collapse? Yes.

There are things you can help and things you can't. There are necessary evils in the world, and the solution to them isn't a politically-motivated ban. China is not a nice place to live, and unfortunately there's no 1-step way of fixing that.

Similarly, banning seal products because organizations that depend on public outrage for their very existence have managed to incite public outrage over yet another wild misconception, is also not going to solve a problem but rather create unemployment in an already-faltering economy.

One more time: I don't like the idea of animals being killed. At the same time, there are much worse things happening. To pick and choose arbitrarily, "killing seals is bad," "having animals live their entire lives in a 1x1 cage is ok," "killing bulls for entertainment is ok,"... what are people thinking?

[Pressure Line]

To wind up vegetarians, I always just point at my eye teeth, and say "these are no good for eating plants yo."

You dont eat plants then?

Ofc I do. I also have molars, for grinding food up. But thank you for missing my point completely. Humans are omnivorous, our body is designed to live on a diet of both plant and animal matter, compare the human digestive tract to that of a dedicated herbivore (like a cow) and it becomes pretty damned obvious that humans were not built to only eat plants.

back to the topic at hand!

Take a look at Shark finning (where a shark is caught, then has its fins hacked off and is biffed back into the sea [ps: its alive during this entire process] while the fins get turned into soup) while people *do* protest against this practice, there's certainly never going to be a massive public outcry, because... well lets face it, sharks are not nearly as photogenic as cute cuddly seal, so its kinda hard to give a toss (and sharks eat people, we tend not to like non-mammals that do eat people)

[Gota]

Fucken mammels.
It all went down the drain after the dinosaurs.

[[TS]Lollocide]

Fucken mammels.
It all went down the drain after the dinosaurs.

No wonder that Fish looks shocked, he's got another fish up his backside

[Satirik]

didn't read the 5pages, but they were banned for the way canadians are killing them not because they're killing them, killing animals (cute or not) for anything is ok, but hitting them until they die (or stop moving) isn't, it's just torture

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qWixGCSI0E

[Caydr]

A video with such an obvious agenda isn't evidence of widespread wrongdoing, and a youtube video doubly so. People that see these PETA-bait videos and instantly conclude that they've seen a preview of how the entire industry operates need to attend a class on media literacy.

Videos are great for putting across a viewpoint - they trigger emotion much more easily than just text or images, and more importantly, you can't rebut them without yelling at your TV. Sensationalist stuff is everywhere, people need to use some sense before accepting everything they see as being fact.

I can easily come up with videos that seem to prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that the WTC was destroyed by American MIBs to inspire outrage to start a war. Did it really happen? I really doubt it, but hey, there's a video, so by your apparent method of reasoning it must be true.

The name of the thread is, "Is it wrong to kill cute animals, for food and clothing?" This is a clever way of phrasing "Do you care about animals that are killed if they're not cute?" Basically, do you have less sympathy for fish, pigs, and cows that are slaughtered than you do for cats and dogs who are slaughtered, in China for instance.

Obviously the answer is yes, which is intended to remind you of the fact that you're all a bunch of giant hypocrites, so you should piss off and stop judging things that you don't understand from other cultures. That is, unless you intend to "liberate" Canada next.

There isn't a lot of demand for seal-meat, so killing seals is very wasteful from a holistic, "use the entire buffalo" POV.

That's why we only kill a quarter million of them. Did you actually research this statement or just assume that since you've personally never seen a sale on seal meat that nobody eats it?

Yes, there are hunters who don't obey the rules. If there is an industry where justice and morality are the top priority, please introduce me to it.

http://video.hsus.org/?fr_story=ff13928 ... 5a9d&rf=bm

Congratulations on finding a video of something controversial, your next lesson will be to find out what a meme is.

You posted a video from the humane society's web page. And it feels that the treatment of animals is inhumane! Quick, someone make a society for it! Oh, it already exists, thank goodness, we can just donate and surely 97% of our money won't go to administration fees.

Unfortunately the entire internet cannot be accepted as fact at face value, and the actions of one individual do not represent the actions of another individual or of an industry as a whole.

In 2005, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) commissioned the Independent Veterinarians Working Group Report. With reference to video evidence, the report states: "Perception of the seal hunt seems to be based largely on emotion, and on visual images that are often difficult even for experienced observers to interpret with certainty. While a hakapik strike on the skull of a seal appears brutal, it is humane if it achieves rapid, irreversible loss of consciousness leading to death."

Is it taken out of context? Does it actually represent the WWF's feelings on a matter? Who cares, research is hard, I'll just post it.

[brian]

.

But to ban hunting an animal just because it's cute is to try to impose your values on another culture. The Inuit have been doing this for over four thousand years.(of total war) Not all the hunters are Inuit, but isn't it silly to say that if you're not born in location X it is morally reprehensible to hunt a certain animal?

But if you're going to ban seal, ban all the other meat from animals that don't volunteer to be eaten.

I agree to ban hunting animals, but we can't avoid that we are going to hunt those wild animals. Just curious what hunting knives they used in hunting them?

[SpliFF]

If you kill the CUTE animals that only leaves the UGLY ones! Did you ever stop to think about that? Do you want to live on a planet where everything looks like this:

Is that what you want??! Well is it?!

ugly_something.jpg (20.9 KiB) Viewed 3537 times

Think about it!

[Pxtl]

My brother lives in Iqaluit. He's a green, earth-loving hippie, and utterly loathes the idiotic animal-protectionists who intrude up there.

First of all, remember that the traditional Inuit (or any of the other northern "Eskimo" cultures) is almost entirely raw meat. I don't mean "raw meat and some veggies" - I mean they hardly ate _anything_ other than raw meat - in summer you'd get a few blueberries sprouting around, and certain animal fats can be used for making a sort of primitive oil-stove... but most of the time, their food is a half-frozen slab of raw fish, whale, or seal. Nunavut was one of the last primitive places on earth - the elders barely speak English, and remember the days before cities.

Nutritionists spent decades trying to figure out how the hell this is even humanly possible. Basically, all their nutrients come from the fact that raw meat contains a complete spectrum of nutrients simply because the dead animal needed them all to survive. They get their citric acid from slabs of fermented whale-skin. They get all their carbohydrates from fat instead of veg carbs. The idea of carnivore humans is crazy, but there it's _real_. Everything they ate was meat. Hell, everything they _owned_ was meat. There are no trees up there, no cotton, nothing. Their clothes were skins and furs, their sculptures were bone and stone. The only wood was driftwood.

To make it clear: this isn't some abstract "hundreds of years ago we wore wampum and hunted Buffalo" thing. This is the life of real people who are alive right now. Many modern-day Inuit still live like this, just using rifles and snowmachines instead of spears.

The meat they eat isn't farmed. It didn't live a lifetime trapped in a 4x8 cage. It's all wild.

Also, there are a tonne of misconceptions about the seal hunt:

1) The guys clubbing baby seals for furs? White guys, and it's been illegal for a long time. know they traumatized you with a video of it when you were a kid, but they're stopping the wrong seal-hunt. Inuit use nets, rifles, and are looking for _meat_ so they aren't terribly interested in the babies...

2) First Nations cultures are a small (3%) fraction of the seal hunt. Most seal hunting is commercial. Hell, the Europeans kill more seals for overpopulation culling than the Inuit kill!

[tombom]

If you kill the CUTE animals that only leaves the UGLY ones! Did you ever stop to think about that? Do you want to live on a planet where everything looks like this:

ugly_something.jpg

Think about it!

Sorry, aye-ayes are incredibly cute

[rattle]

If you kill the CUTE animals that only leaves the UGLY ones! Did you ever stop to think about that? Do you want to live on a planet where everything looks like this:



Think about it!

that's yan at the age of one and a half... I'd proudly wear a jacket made out of it's skin!

[smoth]

lol

[Forboding Angel]

My niece once bought this seal plushie-toy-doll-thing. She would've been... eightish.

I got her to name it "Club".

"Club the seal".

I'm a terrible human being. Oh well.

hehehe, I hope they serve beer in hell!

[smoth]

UNYU~!

[Panda]

The pink fairy armadillo! Cute!



The dumbo octopus! It looks like one of those little squeaky toys that you get out of a claw machine!

[tombom]

speaking of killing cute animals, i noticed that the campaign against killing dogs for food in china got a front page mention on some newspaper recently

Is it just me who finds this really stupid? It's not as if most of the people against the eating of dog are vegans. They just object for AWW CUTE reasons. They also feel the need to oppose this practise in another country, opposing something that (complete guess) I imagine mostly the poor eat. It's incredibly pathetic.

[SwiftSpear]

Do we actually export seal? I thought they basically hunted them for an internal market. Mostly for their own food.

[knorke]

Is it just me who finds this really stupid? It's not as if most of the people against the eating of dog are vegans. They just object for AWW CUTE reasons. They also feel the need to oppose this practise in another country, opposing something that (complete guess) I imagine mostly the poor eat. It's incredibly pathetic.

agreed, thats stupid.
Not sure about this "beating the dogs because it will make them taste better" which is just unnessecary cruel but iam not sure if this is really common pratice or urban legend.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJvfjiCT ... re=related
whales doing cool stuff