History of the World in 100 Animals by Simon Barnes

Author:Simon Barnes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
Published: 2020-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Pity and terror FIFTY-TWO

SEAL

‘Where billow meets billow, there soft be thy pillow,

Ah, weary wee flipperling, curl at thy ease!

The storm shall not wake thee, nor shark overtake thee,

Asleep in the arms of the slow-swinging seas!’

Rudyard Kipling, ‘Seal Lullaby’

It’s one of those for-all-time images: a baby seal, in its white fluffy coat, a face of 24-carat cuteness looking up in bewilderment at the human towering above him, the human wielding a special club called a hakapik, his face filled with the dispassionate eye-on-the-ball concentration of a top baseball player or cricketer. It was taken by Kent Gavin in 1968, and, like the rhino in Chapter 39, it made the front page of the British Daily Mirror. The headline: ‘The Price of a Sealskin Coat’.

Violent interaction between human and non-human animals is usually acceptable so long as we don’t have to see it: the modern slaughterhouse is only the most obvious example. In the 1960s, with increasing means of communication, better travel and better equipment, we could now view images of seal hunting when sitting at our breakfast tables. In that extraordinary decade, when there was music in the cafés at night and revolution in the air, the world was full of people trying to find a better way of living. This image was a universal cry: surely, we can do better than this?

Seals have been hunted for centuries and they are hunted now. They have been hunted for meat, for fur, for leather and for the oil that can be gained from their carcasses. This has been used for soap, treating leather and, most importantly, for lighting: and in the previous chapter we looked (perhaps by artificial light) at the importance of light for humans.

There are usually reckoned to be thirty-three living species in the subgroup known as Pinnipeds, which belongs to the order of Carnivora. These include walruses, who bottom-feed on the molluscs they dig up with their tusks; sea lions, which have visible external ears and can reverse their hind flippers to move on land with comparative agility; and ‘true’ seals, with no external ears who must shuffle or hump themselves along when on land. The Pinnipeds range in size from the Baikal seal, 3¼ft (1m) long and weighing 100lb (45kg), to the southern elephant seal, up to 16ft (5m) in length and weighing 7100lb (3200kg), the world’s largest living member of the order Carnivora.

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

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