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rfmcdonaldThis news item isn't very surprising.
Given that, yes, in the context of the general devastation of marine ecologies in Atlantic Canada by centuries of overexploiiation, hunting the seals is probably necessary, developing a Chinese market is probably a good thing. I just wonder why, if the European Union's markets are so unimportant, sealers and their backers were so outraged that the Union decided to ban a very unpopular product from its markets. Ah well.
Despite all the hubbub about the European Union's sanctions on the seal hunt, Europe is a relatively small market for Canadian seal products. But China is a big buyer, with greater potential and none of the uproar about animal rights that has made the seal industry a pariah in the Western world.
That's why Fisheries Minister Gail Shea and executives from five Canadian seal-industry companies are in China now, teaming up to work the market that could ensure the survival of Canada's moribund hunt. "There's huge market potential here," Ms. Shea said.
Tonight, Ms. Shea will introduce a seal-fur line at a fashion show at the China Fur and Leather Products Fair in Beijing. She'll also try to ease red tape for seal meat imports.
"They have a completely different approach over here," Bernard Guimont, president of Magdalen Islands seal products exporter Tamasu Inc., said from Beijing. "That's why we think it's a market that for sure has a great future for us."
[. . .]
The animal-rights activism of groups that attack the seal hunt as inhumane, featuring such celebrities as Paul McCartney and images of red blood staining white snow, has won a ban in Europe. But despite efforts to reproduce the campaigns in Hong Kong, the movement has yet to take hold in Chinese culture, where a tradition of eating a wide variety of animals, including dogs, makes it relatively immune to emotional appeals to spare cute seals.
"The Chinese eat anything. And they simply don't understand why you would put one animal above another," said Wayne Mackinnon, chairman of DPA Industries, which exports Omega 3 seal-oil capsules made from harp seal blubber. "I suspect that over the course of the next decade, the Chinese market alone could take all the seal products that we could make."
Given that, yes, in the context of the general devastation of marine ecologies in Atlantic Canada by centuries of overexploiiation, hunting the seals is probably necessary, developing a Chinese market is probably a good thing. I just wonder why, if the European Union's markets are so unimportant, sealers and their backers were so outraged that the Union decided to ban a very unpopular product from its markets. Ah well.
