Quote Originally Posted by Sophist
In fact, I have repeatedly reiterated that it is a horrifying thing. I just don't think that that makes it okay to ignore the facts, or to blind yourself to the unfortunately very reasonable elements of it. There are both drawbacks and positive factors here. It provides meat, oil, elements to be used in pharmaceuticals, income, population control, and fills the bloody desire for furs for people to parade around in, which would otherwise be filled much more cruelly using farmed animals.
And, from the humans' perspective, it can mean the difference between staying in your own house and eking out a meagre but honest subsistence, or moving to the city and going on public assistance. It may not sound like a big deal to modern city-dwellers, but if you grow up in a culture whose underpinnings are the work ethic, religion, the work ethic, and the work ethic, public assistance is tantamount to pronouncing yourself morally bankrupt and functionally dead, unworthy of your family and a traitor to everything you care about.

Seals aren't endangered, except by the food shortage humans caused by unsustainable fishing. To a Newfoundlander, a seal is like a deer would be to most of us down here.

A lot of the debate is centered around outdated and outright falsified graphics & videos circulated by people like Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherd, who get extremely rich by implying that baby seals are still hunted before they're old enough to swim (or to look like a wild animal instead of a cuddly toy). It's a high-profit business, built around fleecing the overprivileged and undereducated, and unfortunate in that it discredits real environmentalists everywhere.

Love, Columbine