The wackos are back

The once-mighty animal rights movement is trying to bring back its glory days.

In an attempt to revive the influence it once wielded in the 1970s and 1980s, a coalition of animal rights extremists, led by the Humane Society of the U.S., launched a vitriolic campaign against the Newfoundland seal hunt last month with a series of demonstrations in cities around the world and a threatened boycott of Canadian fish products.

As always, they say they’re not targeting the eastern Arctic seal hunt. But as the Inuit of the eastern Arctic know well, when Newfoundland seal hunters are attacked, Inuit seal hunters get hurt too.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a small but useful renewable-resource economy based on the sale of adult seal pelts was ruined by a European ban on the importation of sealskin products. Because of this arbitrary restriction on trade in a legitimate commodity, the price of seal pelts plummeted, and many hunting families in Nunavut lost a vital source of cash income.

The primary purpose of seal hunting in Nunavut and Nunavik is, of course, the production of nutritious and much-desired food.

But it also has a commercial side: the sale of pelts, which helps hunters get the money they need to pay the ever-rising costs of hunting equipment and supplies. When hunters lose the cash they need to buy things like gasoline, naptha, ammunition, and so on, the entire hunting culture suffers. As numerous eastern Arctic political leaders have pointed out, this is the real threat posed by the animal rights movement. It’s no wonder, then, that these organizations are so thoroughly detested, and feared, in northern Canada.

But should the people of the eastern Arctic be worried by this latest eruption of nonsense from the anti-sealing lobby?

For the moment, no. Last month’s anti-sealing demonstrations failed to attract much participation. In Ottawa, a demonstration of anti-sealing fanatics was upstaged by a group of students from Nunavut Sivuniksavut, who showed up to remind people about the central role that seal hunting plays in most Inuit cultures.

At the same time, the market for adult seal pelts is now healthy. They’ve been fetching record prices recently at the fur exchange in North Bay, Ontario, ranging up to about $90 a pelt. Every year, more than 1,200 hunters in Nunavut are selling about 10,000 pelts into this market, and it’s putting real cash into the pockets of hunters. Fur products are fashionable again, while the animal rights movement is not.

But the animal rights movement also has a powerful reason for continuing its anti-sealing campaign: fundraising. In the 1970s and 1980s, groups like Greenpeace and the International Fund for Animal Welfare used their hysterical manipulation of the Newfoundland seal hunt to extract many millions of dollars from the pockets of gullible donors. Anti-sealing NGOs and their employees also have a vital economic interest in the seal hunt. Their movement is also an industry.

This time around, however, the Inuit of the eastern Arctic are in a better position to counter their propaganda, and to persuade would-be animal rights supporters in the South to keep their money in their pockets. JB