Is it wrong to kill cute animals, for food and clothing?
Posted: 18 Aug 2009, 21:19
You can probably guess what this is about. The EU recently approved a ban on seal products from Canada, due to the mortifying power of ignorant soccer-, sorry, football-moms forwarding emails of the horrific seal hunt.
I wouldn't really care too much about this, normally. To be perfectly honest, if we were living in a world where the realities of the modern farming industry didn't exist, I would be all for a seal ban too.
But reasonably, if you're going to ban seal products because these animals, which are allowed to live their natural lives in the wild, get killed by some quick blunt force trauma to the head, shouldn't virtually the entire meat industry be banned? How about chickens, which are basically tormented from birth and kept in a 1x1 cage until it's time to add a dash of seasoning and put them out of their misery?
There's a perception about the word "club" that brings to mind barbarians and uncivilized... conduct. But if it's the most effective tool for quickly and painlessly killing an animal, what better tool to use? If someone hits you full-on in the skull with a club, are you going to wake up? How about if they hit you not once, but the legally required 3 times? And although it's not enforced as strongly as it should perhaps be, even after this the hunters are supposed to make sure that the brain has been virtually liquefied before they start skinning the animal.
It's not like they just run up to the animal and start wildly swinging. The most valuable part of the animal is its hide, which hunters want to minimize the damage to. This is part of the reason guns aren't used universally. The other part of the reason guns aren't used much of the time is that when you shoot the seal, then you have to catch up to it and - get this - club it in the head! What do you expect, that they're going to administer a powerful sedative and slowly rock it to sleep, crying tears of shame and remorse for killing such a cute lil' fella? It's called hunting. It's pretty common. Get used to it. You kill the animal, rip it apart, and sell its bits to the highest bidder. You might have heard of fishing, where the same thing happens, but fish are all icky and scaly so nobody cares.
Does it always go well? No, sometimes the hunter misses. Sometimes the animal suffers terribly. Is the hunter a sadistic torturer, doing it just for fun and to entertain crowds like in bullfighting? No, that would be inhumane and disgusting.
Do you realize the horrors that go on in commercial farms? Compared to that, seals have it good. They're not an endangered species, they're actually very responsibly managed.
This is the truth here: some people have to make a living doing things that the rest of us would rather pay other people to do rather than do it ourselves. We're soft creatures that would rather not see the animal we're about to eat. We turn up our nose at the Chinese eating cat and dog because to us, cats and dogs are precious friends, if not family.
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 wouldn't really care too much about this, normally. To be perfectly honest, if we were living in a world where the realities of the modern farming industry didn't exist, I would be all for a seal ban too.
But reasonably, if you're going to ban seal products because these animals, which are allowed to live their natural lives in the wild, get killed by some quick blunt force trauma to the head, shouldn't virtually the entire meat industry be banned? How about chickens, which are basically tormented from birth and kept in a 1x1 cage until it's time to add a dash of seasoning and put them out of their misery?
There's a perception about the word "club" that brings to mind barbarians and uncivilized... conduct. But if it's the most effective tool for quickly and painlessly killing an animal, what better tool to use? If someone hits you full-on in the skull with a club, are you going to wake up? How about if they hit you not once, but the legally required 3 times? And although it's not enforced as strongly as it should perhaps be, even after this the hunters are supposed to make sure that the brain has been virtually liquefied before they start skinning the animal.
It's not like they just run up to the animal and start wildly swinging. The most valuable part of the animal is its hide, which hunters want to minimize the damage to. This is part of the reason guns aren't used universally. The other part of the reason guns aren't used much of the time is that when you shoot the seal, then you have to catch up to it and - get this - club it in the head! What do you expect, that they're going to administer a powerful sedative and slowly rock it to sleep, crying tears of shame and remorse for killing such a cute lil' fella? It's called hunting. It's pretty common. Get used to it. You kill the animal, rip it apart, and sell its bits to the highest bidder. You might have heard of fishing, where the same thing happens, but fish are all icky and scaly so nobody cares.
Does it always go well? No, sometimes the hunter misses. Sometimes the animal suffers terribly. Is the hunter a sadistic torturer, doing it just for fun and to entertain crowds like in bullfighting? No, that would be inhumane and disgusting.
Do you realize the horrors that go on in commercial farms? Compared to that, seals have it good. They're not an endangered species, they're actually very responsibly managed.
This is the truth here: some people have to make a living doing things that the rest of us would rather pay other people to do rather than do it ourselves. We're soft creatures that would rather not see the animal we're about to eat. We turn up our nose at the Chinese eating cat and dog because to us, cats and dogs are precious friends, if not family.
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.
