A History of the World in 100 Animals by Simon Barnes

Author:Simon Barnes [Barnes, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-05-03T00:00:00+00:00

Saviour of the seals: illustration for Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The White Seal’ from The Jungle Book (published in 1894).

Most seals generally feed on fish, but the leopard seal specializes in penguins and other species of seal. The seals’ adaptations for long and deep diving include fully collapsible lungs, insulating layers of blubber and, sometimes, fur: it follows that, though some species can cope with warm conditions, they are essentially creatures of the cold. You can see a colony hauled out on a beach and basking as if they were sun-worshippers at a Mediterranean resort, but in temperatures that would kill an ill-equipped human.

Humans have mostly liked seals, or at least enjoyed watching them. Many seaside resorts offer trips to the seals: in Norfolk, in England, several hundred people a day set off on a flotilla of boats to visit the seal colony on Blakeney Point. Seals were kept in ancient Rome: Pliny the Elder remarks that they are amenable to training. Roman citizens could watch seals salute with their flippers and bark in response to certain commands. They could also watch seals in animal shows at the circuses: there are records of polar bears being set loose on seals for the entertainment of thousands. Probably these were mostly Mediterranean monk seals, now an Endangered species.

The trainability of seals is a result of their sociable disposition, and their need to please someone higher up in the dominance hierarchy. They have been trained to amuse humans for at least 2000 years: so much so that they define a human who responds unthinkingly to the requirements of others. In the Clint Eastwood film The Dead Pool, a character talks of the difficulties of getting a drug-addicted singer to do his stuff: ‘Don’t worry. Johnny’s like a trained seal. Throw him a fish and he’ll perform.’

And while in recent years there have been increasing ethical concerns about performing seals in circuses and as public entertainments, this is nothing compared to the concern generated about seal hunting in Canada after the picture that shocked the world. The harp seal, the principal target, had declined to 2 million individuals by 1960, and it’s estimated that they were killed at 290,000 a year between 1952 and 1970.

Many people spoke out against seal hunting, including Paul and Linda McCartney and Brigitte Bardot. There were responses from governments involved at either end of the trade. The Canadian government introduced quotas in 1971, and later made it illegal to kill ‘whitecoats’: that is to say, harp seals under two weeks old and still in possession of that white coat – in other words, you can’t kill them until they’ve stopped looking cute. In 1983 the EU banned the trade in whitecoat pelts. The USA passed a ban on the hunting of all marine mammals, making some exceptions for hunting by indigenous people.

Commercial seal hunting continues today in Canada, Greenland, Namibia, Norway and Russia. The harp seal population was estimated at 5.5 million in 2005. In other words, objections to the hunting of harp seals cannot be made on the grounds of their likely imminent extinction.

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