This weekend the salmon season finishes, and we shall be back to the unalloyed alimentary pleasures of farmed salmon; although we should not knock it. Without farmed salmon, the native wild salmon would probably have long been fished into extinction. (I must here admit that I've never quite understood how salmon manage to stay alive on farms. An awful lot of them must annually be killed in the brawl at the feeding trough, trampled to death by wild bullocks, and I suppose even a sheep must appear a formidable beast to a poor legless salmon trying to browse on a mountain pasture. These are deep questions and must bide until another day, while we deal with another question).
Tell me; what is more likely to wring the hearts of an Irish Times reader? Which is likely to horrify you the more - the news that a trawler is being laid up for lack of salmon to catch, or a photograph of the corpse of a seal, which had been shot or clubbed to death? Indeed, is there anything more likely to stir the emotions of most decent people anywhere than the notion that seals might properly be culled, for their own good and for the good of the fishing communities which are in direct competition with them?
Enchanting eyes
For the seal is the most anthropomorphised wild animal of all, almost certainly because of its enchanting eyes and delightful aquatic capers. If seals' eyes were small and squinty, and if they made it their business to eat their excrement with every sign of relish, yodelling ho ho ho as they did so, I suspect we would not be so enthusiastic about showing off mummy seal and daddy seal and their various youthful seals to our children.
Seals are not humans. They have no human feelings or human thoughts or human instincts. They have not written - and it is my sad duty to tell you that it is unlikely that they will ever write - a single symphony or novel. They are playful things, to be sure, especially when young, but then so are calves and lambs and little chicks; and piglets are an absolute delight. So why are seals granted an immunity from being treated with the same calculated utilitarianism which drives our policy to other animals?
Utilitarianism is a complex code. It is not merely a rulebook of simple expediency. We know, for example, that to eradicate any species from any environment is to invite some disaster or other, most especially an animal at the top of the foodchain. What damage does the seal do to predators of young salmon? Might it not be beneficial in certain unseen ways? Would not its removal from any locality shift the balance of prey and predator in all sorts of unpredictable ways? Our experience insists: most probably.
Serious competition
So even the most utilitarian of fishermen will not want to exterminate local seals completely. But where they are in serious competition with fishermen for dwindling fishstocks, does it not make sense to have seal culls? Is there any reason why older seals are not shot? Anthropomorphism notwithstanding, is there any reason why in extremis an over-population of seals should not be dealt with by humane killing of seal cubs - not least because a cub which is clinically clubbed will die more swiftly and painlessly than an adolescent that starves to death because fish-stocks have been eliminated? (And gentle reader: might such a death be somewhat preferable to whatever nature has in store for you or for me?)
The hands-off policy towards seals has been driven by pictures of cubs cudgelled to death in Newfoundland. The truth is that seal populations are growing unnaturally large all over the world, and catastrophically so in Canada, because for the first time in our very ancient relationship with the beast, we are not controlling their numbers. They have become the masters. They are able to feast at the table of our Atlantic fishermen, raiding nets and making off with a mouthful of cod here, a morsel of halibut there, destroying far more than they need.
Ravaged catches
Seals are as ruthless towards captive fish as foxes are to poultry in a hen-run. How many fishermen have not seen their catches ravaged by seals gambolling greedily around their nets as they haul them in, power-munching through captive monkfish and turbot which would otherwise pay off the loan for the boat and put food in mouths in homes and restaurants ashore?
But culling the seal population still can't be discussed. Yet for all that seals occupied a special place in the folklore of Atlantic communities everywhere, traditionally when a local seal population endangered the food-supply of a human community, mythology surrendered primacy to human need. The real seal would be eliminated with lethal zeal, even as its mythic form was still being celebrated fondly beside the hearth.
Whether or not the seal is a factor in the absurdly short salmon season this year, our Atlantic fishermen might feel a little more cherished within the human community than are their pinniped rival if the possibility of a seal-cull could be broached. It might not be necessary yet; but a protected species, almost without enemy, and residing on the top of the food chain, is sooner or later going to have to feel the cold steel of man-made death, or else inevitably face the far colder, longer death of famine.
Ah yes. I think I just lost my last animal rights' reader.