Powerful nations call the shots in age of animal imperialism
The Australian, 13 March 2010
Animal rights activists like to be seen as caring, ethically pure people whose concern is to protect bunnies and minks from brutal hunters, skinners and meat-eaters. Yet, as the European Union’s ban on seal imports from Canada shows, inside the velvet glove of animal rights activism lurks the iron fist of political blackmail and coercion.
Welcome to the era of animalistic imperialism, where powerful nations increasingly throw their weight around on the global stage in the name of protecting innocent creatures from unenlightened, barbarous human beings.
This week 30 Canadian senators, MPs and provincial ministers tucked into a meal of seal meat in the parliamentary dining room in Ottawa in protest against European sniffiness about Canada’s annual seal cull.
Last July the EU banned seal imports from Canada, including sealskin - which is used to make everything from bags to sporrans - and seal meat, blubber and oil.
As Canadian politicians have pointed out, the EU’s intemperate ban could have serious consequences for the living standards of some Canadian communities. The export of seal products generated about pound stg. 7 million ($11.5m) a year for people in remote fishing villages and about 6000 people take part in the annual cull on the east coast of Canada.
Many could lose their livelihoods as a result of the EU’s overnight obliteration of the seal-products market in Europe.
But the EU is not concerned with anything as insignificant as how human beings make a living and provide for their families.
Rather, its aim is to assert its moral and ethical authority over what it clearly considers to be a less enlightened nation, and what better way to do that than through protecting cute seals from spike-wielding madmen?
In a world where billions of chickens and millions of cows and pigs are slaughtered every year to feed human beings, campaigners’ super-sympathetic singling out of seals - about 270,000 of which are killed in Canada each year - has always been a curious phenomenon.
The thing that animal rights activists find attractive about the annual seal cull, this utterly minor incident in the broader scheme of mankind’s continuous, inventive use of animals as a source of food and clothing, is that it is the perfect distillation of what they consider to be the destructive relationship between man and nature.
On one side stands Humanity with a vicious spike raised, ready to strike, and on the other side Nature, as symbolised by the oh-so-white, oh-so-innocent seal pup, which we imagine (thanks to Bambi and a thousand other anthropomorphic tales) is probably thinking: “Please don’t kill me.”
For animal rights activists, the blood-stained snows along the coasts of Canada, those brutal red splashes on the pure white ice, perfectly symbolise the brutalism of humankind. That is why the seal has become the poster boy of miserabilist, misanthropic greenies everywhere.
In Australia, the Aboriginal landowners of Cape York have fallen victim to the same people-hating environmental crusade. The Queensland government has bowed to pressure from the Wilderness Society to pass the Wild Rivers legislation, which prevents indigenous people making productive use of their own lands.
It is significant that the Queensland legislation was championed by an organisation with a name that portrays its dystopian ambition to rid sections of the planet of humans altogether. Like the campaigners threatening the livelihoods of indigenous Canadian seal-hunters, they pursue their morally arrogant objectives from the comfort of the inner-city suburbs.
That is why the EU could so easily exploit this issue, this readymade Concern For Seals that presses every liberal’s outrage button, as a way of exerting some moral authority in the global arena as it is losing its legitimacy in the eyes of many ordinary Europeans.
The EU isn’t alone. More nations and international institutions now lecture apparently inferior foreigners through the animal issue.
The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, which has 171 member-states and is inevitably dominated by the most powerful ones, severely restricts the hunting of elephants for ivory in African nations such as Botswana, South African and Namibia, in the name of animal rights.
Many want whaling banned and for the Japanese to be allowed to eat only normal fish and meat like the rest of the civilised world. Whale campaigners call on their political leaders and international institutions to punish the Japanese and force them to change their wicked ways.
“What could be more barbaric than driving a spike into a baby seal’s head?” ask activists and officials.
I can think of one thing more barbaric: the depiction of foreign peoples as uncivilised and the curtailment of their sovereign rights by Western nations and green campaigners who think they know better than those moose-eaters, blacks and Japanese.
Read more of my articles for The Australian and other publications here.
