perfidy

I'm sure that the rest of the Ministers got theirs, but I must have missed the memo on the start of the Canadian seal-clubbing season. Dang.

Via an article in the April 4 2007 Economist (subscription required) entitled "On thin ice", I've learned that global warming has impacted Southern Canada's ability to provide fodder for the particpants in its seal-clubbing industry. Clearly, the government needs to do something to avoid disenfranchisement of the affected group.

THE activists have armed themselves with helicopters, video cameras and outrage. The hunters have their sharp hooks and blunt clubs, often combined into a single sinister-looking instrument of Norwegian design known as a hakapik. Canada's seal-hunting season officially began on April 2nd along with the usual row between those who denounce it as senseless cruelty and those who defend it as a traditional and necessary part of local livelihoods. Thanks to global warming, however, the argument might soon become redundant.

So it seems that the protesters are impaired in their ability to effectively protest. Global warming - Is there anything it can't do? Admittedly, not everyone can muster much sympathy for the perpetually outraged pretend-protectors of the cute little seals.

The problem?

This year there has been less of the usual footage of burly men bashing small furry skulls and of blood smeared across the ice floes. That is not because the hunters have become less aggressive, but because suitable seals have become scarcer. Thanks to an unusually warm winter, the ice is melting early in the southern Gulf of Saint Lawrence, where hunting began this week. The seal pups on which the hunt preys are reared on the ice until they are old enough to swim. So the premature thaw has drowned them—before the hunters had the chance to kill many.

Less seal-cranium-crushing= less for PETA, or whomever, to kvetch about. In a nod to realities of the matter, the Canadian government points out that seal hunting "brings income to struggling fishing communities", which I'd guess is a good thing.

Not surprisingly, the protesters don't care, and want to protest, regardless of any benefits to the communities in which the hunting occurs. However...

... campaigners against seal hunting are not wholly beyond reproach either. Few bother to make it clear that the killing of the youngest pups with fluffy white pelts has been banned for 20 years. They also make it sound as if the seals are endangered. In fact, the seal population has tripled since the 1970s.

In another bow to reality, and due to warm conditions in the South, the government has reduced the quota for seal hunters from 335,000 to only 270,000. The practical effect is to have shifted seal-hunting to the colder northern climes.

The sealers in those areas tend to hunt with rifles, and so do not provide such good fodder for media campaigns.

You'd think, reading it, that both the hunters and the complainers are equally wrong-footed by the weather, but that's not the case - the hunters can always head north. There's not enough outrage available up there for the complainers, however, and therefore I stand by my assertion that they're the ones most unfairly affected.

Oh, and yes, the new word learned is hakapik. Help me out here - the name of that tool isn't onomatopoeic, since it surely doesn't make a sound like its name. What's the description of a word which (in its English incarnation, at least) has a name that sounds as though it's describing what you can do with it?

[wik] Technically, if the protesters actually cared about the seals, wouldn't they try to save them from drowning, as well as from the evil hunters?