An easter rant about the seal hunt

Kibbo

Platinum Member
Jul 13, 2004
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Easter is upon us, a less laborious, less driven religious holiday than Christmas. I suspect that Easter retains, for those who celebrate it, more of its original standing as a holy day, as opposed to its secular function as a holiday.

Out West, I read of an American hunter who won a raffle, and with a winning bid of $180,000 (Canadian), this gentleman now has the right to shoot an Alberta bighorn sheep. It's all part of some oxymoronic program to protect the sheep herd. This has, on the surface anyway, a taste of the logic of My Lai ? destroying the village in order to save it. But the revenues from auctions like this are applied to this age's holy cause of animal protection and preservation, in this particular case the Foundation for North American Wild Sheep.

Still, that's a big price for an atavistic high and a set of horns over the mantelpiece. I seriously wonder what the high-profile missionaries of animal rights, the Kelsey Grammers and the Brigitte Bardots, and the Richard Dean Andersons (of MacGyver fame) have to say about it. Or is their fervent attention so exclusively consumed by the annual whinge about the Newfoundland seal hunt that they have not had time to turn their noses to high altitudes and drier game?

Ms. Bardot has attempted to be a Joan of Arc of the Northern ice floes from her salad days as a pouting pussycat in the early oeuvre of Roger Vadim. I've mentioned in an earlier column that she once made it to the shifting ice pans off the Labrador coast ? the first instalment of the now venerable ritual of harassing the Newfoundland sealers performing their ancient cull. In those days, her wattage as a lubricious screen siren neared the incandescence of such bosomy flotsam as Jayne Mansfield and Marilyn Monroe. The mere thought of B.B. and her ever-so-fetching limbs cavorting on a floating scrap of ice hungry for a cuddle left whole armies of photographers drooling.

Hence, slower learners and less captivating presences such as Loretta Swit of M.A.S.H. fame and Shelley Long of Cheers were to follow Ms. Bardot's pioneering ministrations, salve their consciences, and (so they hoped) inflate for a day or two their collapsing careers.

Was this fair? To the seal, I mean. Was the hardy little bubble of blubber merely being exploited to extend the dreary careers of less-than-front-rank entertainers? In our times, publicity is more of a currency than gold, and even now ? 30 years and more from the first Tours of the Ice Fields by the crusading starlets ? I wonder: Was the Newfoundland seal hunt just another set, nature's white sound stage, for greedy little egos to grab another moment in the retreating spotlight?

Did the seals need Ms. Bardot, or Ms. Bardot the seals? The celebrity campaign to save the creatures was always wrapped in an uncomfortable contradiction ? that publicity, as far as I can tell, worked more for the sex kitten than it did for the seal.

Ms. Bardot is not going to the hunt this year. In her evidently bitter twilight, she has called successive Canadian prime ministers "jerks" for not listening to her all these years. Which, considering the source, may be the most incontestable compliment any of them has ever received.

I personally agree with the article, though I'm sure I've been similarly up in arms about issues when I've been misinformed.
 

CycloWizard

Lifer
Sep 10, 2001
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Pretty good article. I think this illustrates the big reason celebrities throw themselves in the political arena, as well as why I question whether or not they really stand for what they claim to stand for. I'm sure there are some that really want to affect change, but most of them are just in it for the limelight.