With apologies to the late Gilda Radner, creator of the Emily Litella character of Saturday Night Live fame: What’s all this fuss we keep hearing about Governor General Michaëlle Jean eating a seal’s heart?
As the grandmotherly Litella, the fictional on-air news commentator, seemed to suggest in each one of her mispronounced and misunderstood missives (“Making Puerto Rico a steak,” “Violins on television”), the all-too-real, current controversy involving Canada’s appointed head of state is nothing but a tempest in a teapot.
In the blogosphere, she’s been called a “badass” and even compared to gun-toting Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who famously decorates her office with dead animals and has admitted to having shot wolves from helicopters. We can only imagine that People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is already hard at work preparing a new shock-treatment ad campaign to call the GG down for what they would say is a heartless, provocative act.
But guess what? We have absolutely no problem with the GG’s actions in this instance.
Eating an animal’s heart? Heck, people eat raw oysters, cows’ and geese’s livers, pigs’ intestines, Brussels sprouts, geoducks and lots of other things that might be considered disgusting. Eating the flesh and other organs of seals has been a way of life for Canada’s Inuit for thousands of years. If the animals were endangered, we might have a problem with the GG’s actions. But they’re not. Sealing is a way of life in the Far North, and eating the heart, apparently, is considered a tribute to the animal’s spirit. Kudos to the Haitian-born GG for having the stomach to give it a try and show her respect for a time-honoured way of life.
The controversy involving seals, of course, has little to do with subsistence-style sealing practiced by the Inuit and everything to do with the commercial seal hunt that’s practiced in many northern countries including Canada. A few weeks ago, the European Parliament voted to ban the import of seal products in a protest against what many feel is the inhumane way the animals are killed — using bludgeons and “hakapiks.” And we wholeheartedly agree that it’s inhumane and should be stopped — but mainly because the products derived from the practice are the seals’ skins, not their flesh, and slaughtering the animals to satisfy someone’s idea of high fashion is heartless and unnecessary.
Incidentally, if this were only about the ethical treatment of animals used for food, why not focus on the factory-style slaughterhouses (euphemistically called “rendering plants” or “meat-packing plants”) used to kill cows, pigs, chickens and other domesticated animals? The fact is, we all have to eat, and much to some people’s chagrin, most of us get a high percentage of our protein from animal flesh.
And what about fish? We should be far more shocked with the rapid decline of our West Coast salmon stocks through overfishing, fish farming and mismanagement than we have been to date. After all, their loss would represent the loss not only of a vital industry, but of a way of life practiced by aboriginal peoples in our region for thousands of years.
But we digress. In its recent declaration, the European Parliament made it clear that it had no problem with the sort of subsistence sealing that takes place among the indigenous peoples of Canada, Greenland, Norway and elsewhere. Governor General Jean’s actions this week were merely meant to show her support for their struggle to retain their traditional way of life, not as a provocation to those opposed to the commercial seal skin industry. Bravo, Madame GG.
