So the choice is to club baby seals or club baby fishermen? Hmm…
Obviously we should club baby fishermen. Anyone who would fish for babies needs to be stopped immediately. The hooks damage the delicate cheek meat. Everybody knows babies should be harvested with gillnets.
Either is fine by me - they both taste good with Worcestershire sauce…
Oh back that up a few years. In 1974 I was in the 7th grade. 1st year of Jr. High. We all did a huge year-long unit on Endangered Species. The WWF and other organizations were a hot topic and great resource in those pre-Internet days.
In 1974 the World Wildlife Fund was using images of clubbed baby harp seals to solicit for funds and raise awareness.
Cartooniverse
:dubious: Back when this issue was more in the public view I had heard that clubbing was used so as not to damage the pelts. Hard for me to believe it’s the most humane method possible.
I don’t think anyone said it was the most humane… They said it was the method that caused the least amount of visual damage to the coat. I have to wonder if some kind of stungun would be more humane (you know, other than the whole stop-killing thing).
How about asking politely? “Come on, please? We have an entire crate of Members Only jackets to trade, so pelt donors don’t get cold. Anybody?”
Actually I think **abel29a ** said it. Read the quote in my post.
About the humaneness of the use of clubs to dispatch the baby seals:
For a killing method to be considered humane it should:
[ul]
[li]Be quick, happening so quickly the animal doesn’t realize what’s going on[/li][li]Be reliably fatal, having a high success rate[/li][li]In some way eliminate, or reduce the animal’s fear[/li][/ul]
For the purposes of fur harvesting, the goal is to kill the seal without damaging the fur, so that the pelt can be cut for maximum utility.
Given that harp seals appartantly have no instinctive fear of humans, I’m not sure that using a tazer would appreciably add to the humaneness of the killing method - the seals are already unafraid, so there’s no reason to worry about their panic as the killer gets close.
I’m not going say that clubbing is necessarily the most humane method available, but it does seem to me, based on these assumptions that it’s reasonably humane, and effective.
Whether the harvest should go on, at all, is another question altogether, of course. AFAIK harp seal fur isn’t one of those rare natural fibers that has some quality that hasn’t been matched or exceeded by synthetics. (ISTR, wolf fur is still unique for its ability to pass moist breath without letting it freeze on the fibers, making it highly prized for arctic conditions.)
I won’t swear this is true, but one story that went with this practice is that the hunters didn’t necessarily wait until they were sure the baby seal was dead before starting the skinning process.
I am not sure what you are basing your assumptions of it being reasonably humane on. In fact, if you make an analogy of dispatching a human adolescent with a baseball bat or such, I can’t imagine it to be quick, reliably fatal from a single blow or eliminating any sort of fear. The humane way of killing any animal without damaging the pelt is a very well placed silenced shot that enters the brain through one of the existing facial orifices.
Animals get harvested globally for food, and clothing, and oil, other uses too. The seal hunt is a managed effort with quotas and restrictions. It’s no worse, and in fact perhaps much more humane than slaughter houses for bovines, chickens, hogs and the like. The seals happen to be cuter. Big deal: get over it.
groman, I disagree strongly that a baseball bat would be a good comparison for a lethal club - it’s too light for proper blunt force trauma. According to this wikipedia link, they average no more than about a kg.
Doing a quick look at the Wikipedia link on sealing, my own estimate of what a seal club might be was way off - I was imagining something like a maul.
Instead the tool used (or weapon if you prefer) is the hakapik.
The number of organizations coming forward to defend the relatively humane nature of the hakapik, for sealing, includes the WWF. They seem to have been the driving force behind the 2005 Independent Veterinarians Working Group(IVWG) Report.
Again, I’m not defending the taking of seals for pelts. It is simply that I can see clubbing as being a humane means of harvesting.
My personal moral opposition is twofold – I am specifically opposed to any kind of slaughter or hunting of carnivorous mammals and I am generally opposed to any large scale human activity. Why do I need to get over it?
I know what you mean, and I agree with you, but when you get down to it, what animal products are really “needed”? It’s perfectly possible to lead a healthy vegan lifestyle.
I don’t see where those vegans act so moral. Did you ever consider that they may just really hate plants?
Everybody has their own, equally valid, idea of needs. I want air to breathe, but I also need air (because I like to breathe and I want to). You can argue need is a false concept, and one can argue that one needs everything one desires and then some, and you can argue everything in between, but I don’t think you’re ever going to have any sort of firm reference point to base logical arguments on. It’s just a matter of how you feel about needs.
If anyone has the need or desire to debate the ethics or utility of animal harvests, I would suggest that they open their own thread in Great Debates rather than hijacking this General Question that is only tangentially related.
I’m not going to offer anything about the right or wrong of this, but I just want to mention that hakapik is not the only weapon used on seals. I have a large seal club outside my office (education use only! 
) It’s about 5 feet long and pretty heavy - weighs at least 8 pounds. These aren’t baseball bats.
They are still one of the options available for hunters in Canada - I don’t know the frequency of use of these options, but the choices are listed here: Why do they club seals?
More (somewhat morbid) on the certainty of death:
[sub]Please don’t construe the above as an endorsement of seal hunting by wevets, or any of his subsidiaries or appendages.[/sub]
On the question that came up earlier about seals vs. fishermen - often very simple ideas are suggested as a zero-sum game about fish. The best documented case of evidence against this occurred with fur seals in South Africa (you can read more about it in Northridge and Hofman, Marine Mammal Interactions with Fisheries, Chapter 5 In: Twiss and Reeves [Eds.] 1999. Conservation and Management of Marine Mammals, Smithsonian Institution Press.) It was widely believed that culling South African fur seals would increase the number of anchovies available for the fishing industry. Instead, the squid population (also prey of the fur seals) increased, and since the squid eat anchovies, the number of anchovies available actually decreased. It’s easy to make simple hypotheses about a complicated food web, but the complexity of the food web usually defeats the simple hypothesis.
Regarding the coat of the seals, seal lanugos (baby coats) tend to be much softer then adult coats - I’m not an expert on fabrics, but I can imagine that it’s a hard fabric to match.
I’m not an expert on fabrics either, but I’m pretty sure that sealskin isn’t fabricated. 