The Seal Nations
The seals of the north, that live in cold Atlantic waters off the coasts of Canada, Greenland, Norway, and Arctic include the harp seal and the hood seal. They are completely evolved and live in perfect harmony in the cold waters of icy blues and greens, that are rich in fish and squid. They are magnificent creatures. They can glide through the water streamlined with grace and speed. The ice is their friend, the depths of the ocean their playground. They can move in all directions in the water, turn, do circles, spin. They live in all four dimensions when they are in the water. They are capable hunters and doting parents. They have their migration patterns coming south in the winter to have their pups on the lightly floating ice packs that form far out off the coasts of Canada. The ice packs are their landing base. They are creatures of water, land and air. This is their life. The seas and coasts are their home. And they have the right to live in their own homes, without being treated as intruders by human beings.When Europeans first came to North America, there was an assault on wildlife. Many species became extinct, such as the giant Auk in Canada and the passenger pigeon in America. This was not something entirely new for the human species. In earlier days, during the ice age, humans had killed off the sabre tooth tiger and the wooly mammoth from North America, not learning how to coexist with these giant animals. However we are at a stage now in our human evolution, where we realize not only that we should not kill animals to extinction but that we have a bond with them and should not act cruelly toward them, and that they have a right to live on this earth the same way that we do. What is needed now, is to further revive and strengthen our bonds of compassion with the animal kingdoms and our understanding of how to coexist with them, living in balance with the natural world.
While the seals are completely evolved and adapted, humans are still evolving and causing much havoc in the process. We are passing through a very short, but greatly destructiveness stage in our human evolution. We have come all the way from subsistence living to great mastery on how and where we live. We have developed the ability to create. The wild animals live balanced with their environment. However humans have evolved beyond the natural state of the animals, to a plastic stage. We have gone to the limits of expansion, exploitation and conquest. And now the arc is on the descent, where we are working and evolving toward once again being in harmony with the earth.
The European Parliament passed a ban on the import of seal products May, 2009. And so they are leading the way toward ending the cruel massacre of seals off the eastern coast of Canada that happens every winter. They are the ones leading the way on ending the massacre and they were also the ones involved in starting it in the 1750s. The English and French came to Canada and discovered the great populations of seals that lived on the eastern coast. Immediately there was an all out race to exploit these wild animals for money. There was absolutely no concern or concept that the seals had a place that was rightfully theirs, to live in those waters. The Europeans that arrived to Canada were completely out of harmony with the natural world because they were fixated on exploiting it, which meant mass extermination for the seals.
First it was the harbour seals and the grey seals that were killed because they were year-round residents. Later the French, English and Irish immigrants who made their home in Newfoundland began to massacre the harp seals and hood seals for train oil, which was used as a source of oil to illuminate lanterns. And baby seals were killed for their fur, to make expensive muffs and stoles for aristocratic women. It became a big monopoly game as to who would be the best at exploiting and killing the seals, how many could be killed and how much money could be made. There were many sea captains and companies who killed the seals by the millions to make great riches. For the seals, this meant a war of extermination was being waged against them in their own home. For the sealing companies, it was an easy, quick, short-term way to get rich.The whole sealing business was a degradation for the seals and the men who were hired to kill them. The regular Newfoundland men who signed on as sealers, were treated as expendable. They lived their lives practically as slaves, making meagre amounts of money, going out with the ships to kill seals, and risking their lives jumping from ice floe to ice floe, getting stranded and freezing to death, or falling in the water and getting frozen. Thousands of men lost their lives as a matter of course. They were like a band of people stranded on an island and exploited for their slave labor. It was the only way to make a living if you lived in Newfoundland and it was a tradition handed down from father to son. Making a living this way, killing seals by the thousands, risking your life and being treated as a slave, must have turned their hearts and minds very hard and cold, like coal ice. Their compassion and natural feeling for wildlife receded deeper and deeper into them, so that it was unreachable, locked away, barred from existence. And in its place was an implacability, and relationship with seals that consisted only of violence and death. Blood, the very symbol of life force, was spilled by the thousands of gallons on the white ice every year, with not any remorse or taboo. And as humans with great capacity for kindness and compassion, this must have turned something in them inside out. The bond with other life was not honored, but stomped on instead.
And yet there must be something in human beings that will try to find a source of inspiration to continue on even in the most adverse conditions and even to find some romanticism and pride in what you do, no matter how out of harmony it is with the natural world or the inner world. And then to go further, and make themselves into a small legend, with the triumph being survival in extremely harsh conditions. And you can hear this from the modern sealers too, who talk about themselves as though everyone should take great pity on them, because their lives are hard, while they are blind to the plight of the seals and their lives, as if the seals don’t even deserve to live. This is a warped view of valuing humans and devaluing wildlife.
This bleak enterprise of the massacre of the seals, marched forward with wanton disregard for the destructiveness and cruelty being perpetrated on the seals. The rich companies, the rich sea captains, and the slave laborer Newfoundland men went out each winter to kill the seals. This was the 1800s to the mid 1900s. Later on, after WWII, the Norwegians brought their ships to the front to make profit from the seals. And the Norwegian Karlsen shipping company set up shop in Canada in order to have legal rights to exploit the seals in Canadian territorial waters. It was a war against the seals, for the sake of great financial gain for a few wealthy businessmen and a meagre living for the thousands of sealers. The bond of human life to seal life was completely broken. Men meant terror and death for the seals.
The 1960s brought an awakening to many people in North America, with civil rights movement, women’s right, indigenous people’s rights, and animal rights. Maybe this was all a resurgence of the feminine aspect of humans, being so long suppressed and disparaged during the periods of warfare and conquest between nations. And thank goodness for the sake of the seals, some people were taking notice of their plight and advocating for change on their behalf. It was by accident that a small film company made a film about eastern Canada in 1964 and filmed the bloody seal hunt. When it was shown on television, there was an outpouring of outrage about the cruelty of this seal slaughter in Canada as well as America and Europe. Brian Davies of the International Fund for Animals, Greenpeace, and later Captain Paul Watson of Sea Shepherd and the Humane Society all got involved in trying to end the annual seal massacre off the eastern coast of Canada. However the Newfoundlanders and the governing body for the fisheries and oceans were digging in, and holding onto this grisly practice. And it was as if the cold hardened heart of the Newfoundlanders had made a fortress against any outside interference. Like a stone castle made of petrified fossils, with only a moat allowing insiders to come and go. They wanted to be able to continue this massacre of the seals against all reason or emotional pleas to end it.
And continuing on to the present day, even as the EU passed a ban on import of seal products, it is still barbarism that rules and presides over the exploitation of wild animals in Canada. Though nobody is even making any profits from killing the seals as they did in the past, they still want to perpetuate this practice. And aside from trying to make a profit from seal products, the department of Fisheries and Oceans in Canada and the Newfoundland fisherman want to kill the seals to keep them off of the coasts. They use falsified information to scapegoat the seals and claim they are a kind of vermin that must be destroyed because they kill cod which the fisherman need for their livelihood. Studies show that the seals do not cause diminished populations of fish such as the cod, but that it is decades of overfishing by humans that has caused this. So the fight for the rights of the seals must continue until they are allowed their rights to live peacefully in the cold eastern waters of Canada and the arctic as they have for millions of years.
Farley Mowat, the great Canadian writer on the history of the conflict of modern man and nature writes in his book, Sea of Slaughter:
When our forebears commenced their exploitation of this continent they believed the animate resources of the New World were infinite and inexhaustible. The vulnerability of that living fabric – the intricacy and fragility of its all-too-finite parts – was beyond their comprehension. It can at least be said in their defence that they were mostly ignorant of the inevitable consequences of their dreadful depredations.We who are alive today can claim no such exculpation for our biocidal actions and their dire consequences. Modern man has increasing opportunity to be aware of the complexity and interrelationship of the living world. If ignorance is to serve now as an excuse then it can only be willful, murderous ignorance.
Five centuries of death-dealing on this continent is not to be gainsaid; but there are at least some indications that we may finally be developing the will and the conscience to look beyond the gratification of our own immediate needs and desires. Belatedly we seem to be trying to rejoin the community of living beings from which we have, for so long, alienated ourselves – and of which we have, for so long, been the mortal enemy.
Evidence of such a return to sanity is not yet to be looked for in the attitudes and actions of the monolithic organizations that dominate the human world. Rather, the emerging signs of sanity are seen in individuals who, revolted by the frightful excesses to which we have subjected animate creation, are beginning to revolt against the killer beast man has become.
Banding together in groups of ever-increasing potency, they are challenging the licence of vested interests to continue savaging the living world for policy, profit, or pleasure. That they are having an effect is attested to by what they have already accomplished in just the past few years. A prime example is their achievement on behalf of the ice seals. Although they are being furiously opposed by the old orders, it would appear that they are slowly gaining ground.
It is to this new resolution to reassert our indivisibility with life, to recognize the obligations incumbent on us as the most powerful and deadly single species ever to exist, and to begin making amends for the havoc we have wrought, that my own hopes for a revival and continuance of life on earth now turn. If we persevere in this new way, we may succeed in making man humane … at last.
And then the Sea of Slaughter may once again become a sea of life.