Namibia's seal hunt is the second largest in the world. Ministers in the past have said the seal "harvest" is a vital source of jobs and income, and is necessary to reduce the seal population in order to protect Namibia's fishing industry.Namibia's Fisheries Minister asks why animal rights activists "are not rallying around the hake or pilchard." It's easy to understand the error. Animal rights activists rally around all animals and want to see all exploitation stopped. However, the larger, deeper-pocketed animal welfare organizations tend to focus their campaigns on specific species and not on animals like fish, which are used for food, perhaps because that could turn off many of their cuddletarian donors.
This does not, however, make Minister Iyambo's argument any more sound. He argues that seals are a marine resource to be exploited like any other (revealing the lie behind the argument that they are protecting their fisheries from seals), but animal rights advocates would disagree. This is not about sustainability. Nor is it about killing the seals in a less inhumane manner. What this is about is one species, which has the collective intelligence and technology to avoid killing animals for food and commerce altogether, exploiting the defenseless members of another species to make an easy buck, and that's wrong.
Labels: seal slaughter, wildlife
