Canis lupus hominis

One things that has always irked me about certain animal welfare and animal rights organizations is that they try to use emotion to evoke political action. Now, I’m a rationalist. Logic is my fundamental way of sorting out the world. Emotions mean very little to me. I trust my rational mind more than I trust my emotions, which might be a fault– but my skeptical sense are usually quite heightened.

So when I get a video sent to me about some horrible animal cruelty, I would like for it to have some fact and figures in it and not cute pictures of ice seal pups. I’m against the seal hunt, not because the seal pups are cute. I’m against it because I don’t believe the Canadian seal hunt is sustainable. I think it is a way of subsidizing the lifestyles of poor fishermen, which I totally understand. These fishermen have received the short end of the stick when it comes to national and international fisheries policy. I’m not against the fishermen who go seal clubbing. I’m more against the trawlers who have robbed these fishermen of their livelihoods. The seal hunt is one way, and very poor way, for their government to make amends for the bad policy.

But what I can’t stand is this propaganda against the fishermen. These videos, of which there are scores–maybe hundreds!– on youtube, are against the fishermen who go and club seals for a little extra money in the off-season.   I don’t like the seal hunt, but I don’t transfer my disdain over to the fishermen.

Life in the wild is cruel for these seal. Many of them die at the jaws of orcas or Greenland sharks. A few might wind up in the claws of a polar bear, although these seals tend to whelp on the pack ice, a long distance from the polar bears. The clubbing isn’t the issue for me. It is that these seals whelp in an environment that is disappearing, and too many inexperienced clubbers are killing far more seals than the quotas allow. The quotas count only seals brought in– not seals that are clubbed. We never know how many seals are clubbed and die without ever being brought in.

You see, that’s how my mind works.

Showing me pictures of ice seal pups and then showing blood on the ice does nothing for me. Nature is red in tooth and claw. I’m not against trapping foxes and dispatching them in a similar fashion. That is a better death for the foxes than dying of mange or distemper.

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When someone tries to get me by the emotions, that’s when I start becoming skeptical. I’ve seen too many people taken as fools because some charlatan got them to put their feelings above logic.

Maybe I’ve made logic too important in my decision making process. Charles Darwin once lamented that his mind had become too used to logic and facts that he no longer could experience certain emotions, or rather, certain emotions no longer had an effect upon him.

A big chunk of our lives is now dedicated to taking the contradictions out of emotional and rational minds. However, I think it’s probably a better idea if we let the contradictions stay there. Our species has always been a contradiction. We are both individualistic and altruistic. Any political philosophy that assumes that we are one or the other is doomed to fail.  In that same vein, we are both emotional and rational beings, although I must say that I’m much more rationalistic than emotional.