Image versus image?

Should the Nunavut government fight the animal rights movement with the same weapons that the animal rights movement have used so successfully over the past 30 years against Newfoundland sealers, aboriginal people and other powerless, marginalized peoples?

That is a difficult question to answer.

But with the release last week of “Waiting at the Edge,” a 48-minute video on Inuit seal hunting financed by Nunavut’s Department of Sustainable Development, it is a question that Nunavut residents must think about carefully.

The video is a laudable attempt to provide the world with some badly-needed pro-Inuit propaganda. There’s no doubt that the people of the world need to know that seal hunting is about more than the killing animals and that it’s also about the intangible bonds that unite people, land, and wildlife in Nunavut. There’s no doubt that the world needs to know that the animal rights movement is a dagger pointed at the heart of Inuit culture.

But is it good strategy for the government of Nunavut to join a battle whose weapons are image, emotion, irrational distortion of truth and mass hysteria?

The anti-seal hunt campaigns conducted by organizations such as the International Fund for Animal Welfare have nothing do with “debate” as that term is commonly understood. Debate has to do with facts and logical arguments based on facts.

The animal rights movement, led by organizations like the International Fund for Animal Welfare, bases its appeal on the crude exploitation of visual images torn from their natural context and then re-combined into new constructions intended to stimulate powerful emotions and to suppress rational thinking.

Their use of video, film and still images, and their ability to either buy or sneak these images into the mass media have made the animal rights movement a powerful force. They have successfully demonized a few hundred low-income people in Atlantic Canada who spend a few weeks on the ice every year to supplement their income with seal hunting. Eastern Arctic Inuit who can’t make a living anymore from selling seal pelts have been the collateral damage in this irrational war.

The animal rights phenomenon is more than just a social and political movement. It’s also a powerful machine for extracting cash from the pockets of the gullible. In an article in the January/February 2000 issue of Canadian Geographic magazine, Newfoundland journalist Ray Guy reports that in 1998, 1.8 million people around the world were members of the IFAW, and that in the same year, the IFAW raised $62.3 million U.S. in donations.

So how can the cash-strapped Nunavut government compete with an organization possessing that kind of mass appeal, capable of raising $60 million a year? In deciding to fight groups such as the IFAW on their own ground — image versus image — has the Nunavut government begun a fight that it’s too weak to win?

The other danger is that the people of Nunavut may be too honest to succeed in a war of image manipulation. The truth doesn’t matter much to groups like the IFAW, but it’s a value that is revered by the Inuit of Nunavut.

On the other hand, it would be churlish not too support an initiative such as the “Waiting at the Edge” video. After all, somebody has to tell the other side of the story. JB