The sea dogs

In honour of tonight's home opener for the Saint John Sea Dogs, I thought I would dedicate tonight's blog to sea dogs...Sea dog is a nickname given to seals, such as the ones that live in Saint John harbour.

The greatest threat to seals is a barbaric ritual known as the great seal hunt...this is an annual event where "sealers" kill seals usually aged between 25 days and 3 months old...the government's rationalization for this is that the areas don't have any work for the workers to sustain a living, and that they therefore need to kill seals.

The other arguments for this senseless slaughter are that it is tradition and that it is profitable to tax payers...the problems with this are that tradition has no bearing on whether something is right or wrong (for example, British law used to allow for men to have their way with their wives whenever they wanted and with whatever force they chose) and that the profitability of the hunt is questionable at best...

The seal hunt is condemned by Greenpeace, because "the quotas are "scientifically indefensible" because they don't take into account the actual number of seals killed in the hunt — including those that are "struck and lost," or discarded because of pelt damage" and by the International Fund for Animal Welfare who argue that the hunt in general is inhumane, and that some sealers make it worse by engaging in such activities as skinning seals alive, hunting seals that are 14 days or less old, and that seals are clubbed or shot and left to suffer only to be killed later...

200 people have been charged since 1996 so it is nearly impossible to argue that these behaviors do not happen, though the government argues that this is only an indication that they are enforcing regulations...

In 2006, the seal hunt was supposedly one of the most profitable in history, but since then the quota (number of seals the government decides the sealers can kill) and the value of the pelts (from $105 in 2006 to an estimated $15 in 2009) have deteriorated significantly...

Another argument against the hunt is that the arbitrary manner in which it is run makes it unsustainable (the quotas aren't based on anything concrete, so unless the value of the pelts is high, there is a good chance that any economic goal could be missed)...

All in all, there is no logical reason that we as a society should support such an event, but the kicker in this is that the government subsidizes parts of the hunt, meaning that we as taxpayers are actually paying to support this travesty...