
The Business of Seal Clubbing - bpolania
http://priceonomics.com/the-business-of-seal-clubbing/
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bambax
> _Renowned ecologist Jacques Cousteau_

Cousteau wasn't an "ecologist": he started his career blowing up coral reefs
with dynamite (on film! check it out!); he was also a jerk and an asshole of
mammoth proportions (not to mention, racist and nazi sympathizer).

If your motto is "everything is bullshit", the very least you can do is double
check those kinds of references.

Also, just because humans do horrible things to all kinds of animals (or to
other humans; cruelty is our trade) doesn't make it right to club baby seals.

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roflchoppa
Its 2015, we have the ability to make these cool synthetic fibers that breath
super easy, and look pretty dope. (we have had this tech for a while btw)

I mean I see how in the commercial process of killing the seals is messed up
(natural rights to live...skinning then leaving the meat of the animal on the
ice vs consuming whole animal)

But seriously theres no need to wear the animal if your not living like the
Inuits.

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mhuffman
Well, then how will everyone know I am crazy rich and they should be jealous?

Seriously, I wonder if there have been any studies to the "perception" of the
material. For example, does a natural, scarce material "seem" to be better to
people than a synthetic.

For example, it take high-end analysis to tell the difference between natural
and man-made diamonds, but there is a perceived higher quality to the natural
diamonds. Nature's mystique, if you will ...

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sliverstorm
Seals aren't alone; most hunting for fur has been cut back dramatically (mink,
fox, coon, bear, beaver, otter, sea otter...) Seals may have been the champion
for the anti-fur movements because they are cute, but to my knowledge fur in
general declined because the goal (fashion) was seen as shallow, the rest of
the animal was not used, and the consumers were mostly the very wealthy.

We still use leather, but in the case of cows the entire animal is used and
while leather is sometimes a luxury good (BMW's, couches) it is also highly
functional (gloves, saddles). Which is similar to the Inuit use of seals, and
as the article discussed that use has been mostly OK'd.

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jjtheblunt
I'd observe that the consumers were a very small subset of the very wealthy.

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colin_jack
> On two occasions, I observed pups falling out of the female while being
> pelted on deck. The two pups I observed were alive and were thrown over the
> side. I seen these pups crawl up on the ice after we threw them over aboard.

Grim.

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chm
The final paragraphs are really the most important, in my opinion. Why stop
seal hunting and not mass slaughters of cows?

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gnoway
This article - at least the last few paragraphs - understates what we're
getting out of cows. Yes, the hides are important, but we also eat their flesh
and use their bones for stuff. Cows are not typically skinned and then left in
the field to be picked over. Also cow leather has a larger range of uses than
I imagine seal skin/fur does: the latter is strictly a luxury item and I think
that would be true even if there was unlimited sealing. In short, comparing
seal hunting and cattle farming is maybe not as helpful as the article's
author would like.

I do think the outcry over sealing is because they are cute. As the article
points out, they are not endangered. This also affects the comparison with
whaling. The whales everyone was most concerned about in the 80s definitely
were (are?) endangered, and with whale birth rates being much lower than seals
(and cattle, and poultry), killing an individual whale would have a larger
overall impact on the species.

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sitkack
Almost all animals are mistreated orders of magnitude more than seals are. So
the amount of value we extract from a lifeform dictates how badly we can treat
it? What a very Roman moral aesthetic.

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gnoway
The first statement is false, and the second mischaracterizes what I said. To
me at least, clubbing, skinning and leaving a carcass on the ice is worse than
clubbing, bleeding and then using all of the carcass; dead is dead.

The personal attack doesn't help your cause unless you're just trying to
aggravate people you disagree with.

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sitkack
The majority of animals (by weight) on the planet are livestock. Most are
mistreated. Everything dies, how it gets there is what matters. The utility of
the end state doesn't justify the path taken. The path needs it own
justification.

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sitkack
All the seals I have seen clubbing have been a little naive and in grave
danger of getting roofied.

