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Date: March 26, 2007
Author: Cyril Doll
Origin: Western Standard
When Alan Herscovici hears animal-rights activists question the
sustainability of Canada's $30-million per year seal industry, the executive
vice-president of the Fur Council of Canada says such talk smacks of
hypocrisy. And with March 15 designated as the World Day of Action Against
Seal Hunting--complete with a protest in Ottawa--that sort of rhetoric will
no doubt be presented to the media as fact.
Herscovici argues that the seal hunt is indeed sustainable; but so is the
industry that has been protesting it for about 40 years. "The animal-rights
groups learned through their sealing campaign that there's a lot of money to
be made," explains Herscovici, who authored Second Nature: The Animal Rights
Controversy, a book published in 1985 outlining canards spread among
animal-rights activists. "Protesting has been a great sustainable resource
for them. You can make more money attacking the industry than what the
industry itself makes."
Animal rights activists try to convey that the seal population is in danger
of extinction, explains Elizabeth Cundill of the Fur Institute of Canada.
"The seals don't need saving," says the succinct Nova Scotian. The harp seal
population has been increasing steadily to the point where today there are
an estimated 5.8 million off the Atlantic coast; nearly triple the numbers
there were in the seventies, according to the boasts of Fisheries Minister
Loyola Hearn. In 2006, the minister set the number of seals that could be
hunted at 325,000, or 5.6 per cent of the total population.
The International Fund for Animal Welfare, and groups like it, cut their
teeth protesting Atlantic and Inuit sealers back in 1969. Today it has
evolved into an organization with annual revenue of US$80 million. "It's
ironic that even when the main issue of conservation in animal welfare has
been dealt with, this thing keeps growing. They've learned they can get a
lot of publicity from it, and it becomes a machine in its own right," says
Herscovici.
It looks as if the nonsensical hysteria drummed up by IFAW and like
organizations (with the help of sanctimonious celebrities such as Sir Paul
McCartney) has had an effect on the policies of certain countries, including
the U.S., which since 1972 has banned seal imports. "There's something
hypocritical when . . . the U.S. or Europe bans seal products when 95 per
cent of their populations eat meat," says Herscovici, adding that the U.S.
kills upward of 9 million deer per year.
But it's easy for Europeans and Americans to be anti-Canadian in order to
pander to their left-wing vote. Not too many Newfoundlanders or Inuit vote
in their elections.
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