"Cute, Cuddly, Edible"

Interesting piece in the Economist this week about Canada's seal hunters, who receive a great deal of criticism for the seal hunts that take place each year. The article discusses how the seal blood and guts smeared across ice is not pleasant for anyone to see, but is it any different from the millions of animals slaughtered across Europe each year? Take Britain as an example, the articles states that nobody apparently knows how many seals are killed because the killing is unregulated in Britain, though anecdotal reports put it in the thousands, equivalent to the proportion of Canada's seal population killed in the hunt.

According to the article, a 2005 report from the World Wildlife Fund says that opposition to seal hunting was largely based 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.”

Thoughts?

Read the full article on the Economist here.

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