Human rights and the seal hunt, the debate moves north

[Animal 0]

Human rights and the seal hunt, the debate moves north

Friday, February 5, 2010
By Lorna Dueck, special to CBC News

Spike a seal and watch the emotions boil over on all sides of this debate.

Should those who hunt seals, like the Inuit of Canada's North, be the ones
to determine the future of that species? Or must they surrender their
self-determination ‹ their own human rights ‹ to the interests of those
animal activists who argue a different moral view?

The meeting of the G7 finance ministers in Nunavut this weekend splashes
that messy dilemma all over the world stage.

Since Iqaluit has been chosen, it is a good time to call to mind a kind of
sacred connection.

The connection of what it means for Canadians to know and care for each
other.

Our neighbours

Of course Nunavut's leaders are going to try to leverage this finance summit
to educate us all on who they are.

Is that such a bad thing?

The 35,000 people who live in Nunavut are our fellow citizens, our sisters
and brothers, if you will.

They are not just political pawns to be trotted out when it comes to sealing
or climate change debates. They are the neighbours we seldom have the chance
to understand.

The Inuit are on record, in fact they are even in the European General
Court, saying that their indigenous ways with the seal are directly
connected to the Atlantic commercial seal hunt, the one that is at the
centre of so many protests.

That's also the seal hunt that takes place in those regions where
unemployment is over 15 per cent and where sealing can provide as much as 35
per cent of someone's annual income.

The importance of the spring seal hunt to local economies in Quebec, and
Newfoundland and Labrador, is indisputable. And that itself is a cause ‹ the
survival of small communities ‹ that the Inuit directly relate to.

"We perceive the seals differently than people in the South," says Inuit
Senator Charlie Watt. "To us, they are the wild dogs of the sea and they are
direct competitors for food. Seals, like humans, hunt fish.

"We strongly support the commercial hunt in Canada and we continue to
support our brothers in Newfoundland and the lower St. Laurence."

More than just subsistence

The senator makes the case for what each of us take for granted ‹ the
freedom to support ourselves as we wish, and the freedom from having the
moral judgment of others limit our own self-determination.

"What God has given to us is what we use in order to survive," says hunter
Jackie Nakoolak of Coral Harbour, Nunavut.

"God has given us this land that we're going to look after, and eat what is
given to us."

To defend that choice ‹ and the ability to expand upon it ‹ the Inuit are
actually suing the European Union countries that they will be hosting at the
G7 summit, suing them for their seal-product ban, which cripples the
commercial seal hunt even as it exempts the Inuit's subsistence hunting.

Subsistence alone is not enough, the Inuit are saying. To survive as a
self-supporting community they may well need to develop the resources they
have at hand, including seals.

As the environmentalist and community leader Mary Simon, president of Inuit
Tapiriit Kanatami, put it: "It is bitterly ironic that the EU, which seems
entirely at home with promoting massive levels of agri-business and the
raising and slaughtering of animals in highly industrialized conditions,
seeks to preach some kind of selective elevated morality to Inuit."

So watch as Inuit political leaders take advantage of the G7 finance summit
to show us that the more seal pelts sold to make fur coats and accessories,
the better.

The premier of Nunavut will seat her guests on sealskin chairs, waitresses
will sport seal accessories as they serve seal meat, and, of course, someone
prominent will have a sealskin jacket on.

I doubt the G7 participants will have time to hop on the back of a
snowmobile and follow an Inuit hunter out to sea with a rifle. There they
could worry that the thinning Arctic ice might crack beneath them.

In a community where only one in four adults can find employment, where
subsidized groceries are still five times the price of those in the South,
and where raw meat caught from the land is as vital as beef and chicken is
to those in the big cities, it is pretty apparent just who the EU ban is
hurting.

It is pretty clear, too, that this "Inuit thing" is not just a cultural
quirk but the essence of what it is to be co-inhabitants of a shared planet.

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2010/02/05/f-vp-dueck.html