In Tentative Defense Of Clubbing Baby Seals

Or, why we can't make animal welfare assessments based on what's gross

[Content note: I’m talking in detail about clubbing baby seals.]

In Canada, harp seals—mostly less than three months of age—are commercially hunted for their fur. This is extraordinarily controversial, in part because it’s the largest marine mammal hunts in the world, in part because seal hunting is a traditional Inuit practice (although only a tiny percentage of hunted seals are hunted by the Inuit) and in part because baby seals are really damn cute:

As I discussed in a previous post, there are many factors which affect whether a particular hunt is ethical. In this post, I don’t intend to say for certain that hunting seals is ethical: there are many concerns, such as opposition to killing sentient creatures or the fear that permitting hunting might lead to greater disrespect for nonhuman animals, that this post is simply not scoped to address. I intend only to talk about the narrower issue of how unpleasant seal hunting is for the seal.

Butterworth and Richardson (2013) finds that the Canadian commercial seal hunt causes unacceptable harm to animals—in particular that clubbing and shooting animals might not lead to immediate unconsciousness. The money quote is on page five:

Canada’s Marine Mammal Regulations and Conditions of Sealing licenses fail to adequately prescribe any of these steps [of humane slaughter], allowing sealers to legally herd seals prior to stunning, stun and kill animals in view of each other, repeatedly club or shoot seals to achieve unconsciousness, leave wounded seals to suffer for extended periods of time, impale conscious seals on metal hooks and drag them across the ice, and cut open seals whilst they may be responsive to pain.

So that seems pretty bad.

However, Butterworth and Richardson (2013) isn’t what I would consider the most reliable of sources. It relies heavily on video evidence collected by NGOs which are opposed to seal hunting. You don’t have to be a pro-hunting advocate to suspect that perhaps anti-seal-hunting organizations are not randomly sampling seal hunts. Of course they’re going to be more likely to film animal welfare violations!

So we turn to Daoust et al. 2014, a critique of Butterworth and Richardson (2013). Daoust points out that when a seal is repeatedly clubbed or shot, it may be because the first shot failed—or the sealers might just be making sure that the seal is definitely unconscious and not suffering. Similarly, when seals appear to be alive when pulled across the ice, this may merely reflect the well-documented postmortem swimming reflex, which does not mean that the seals are conscious, much less still alive.

Daoust and Caraguel (2012) involves an actual random sample by the authors, observing actual seal hunts. It found that most seals die very quickly after being shot or clubbed.

Interestingly, Daoust and Caraguel (2012) also found that clubbing¹ baby seals was probably better for seal welfare than shooting them. Sealers are supposed to use a three-step process when hunting seals. First, they severely damage the seal’s skull and brain with a regulation hakapik, club, or rifle, causing permanent loss of consciousness or death. Second, they verify the proper completion of step one by checking that the skull is crushed. If it’s not properly crushed, they need to club the seal again. Third, the seal is bled, which stops blood supply to all parts of the brain and ensures death.

When you shoot a seal with a rifle, some seals escape. This is bad for animal welfare, because having a bullet inside your body isn’t good for you [citation needed]. The animal can wind up experiencing chronic pain or injury and dying in a much more horrible way. A clubbed seal, on the other hand, has zero percent chance of escaping, because the sealer is right there.

About 90% of shot seals are shot in the head (and thus died or lost consciousness instantaneously), with some unknown percentage of the others dying instantaneously even though they were shot in the body. (Sealers are required to use ammunition which has a high rate of instantaneous death even if the head is not shot.) On the other hand, 100% of clubbed seals are clubbed in the head because, again, the sealer is right there.

The sealer who uses a club can check right away that the skull is crushed; if it’s not, they can club it again right away. In fact, some sealers give the baby seal a couple of blows to make sure it’s unconscious before they even bother to check. Conversely, it takes a while to get the carcass of a shot seal—time in which an improperly shot seal may be suffering.

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The baby seal hunts are, in spite of how controversial they are, very small. The size of the hunts pales in comparison to the size of hunts of commonly harvested animals like white-tailed deer, much less the atrocities endured by animals in factory farms every day. So why am I writing about this? I think it’s an interesting example of how our intuitions can mislead us about animal welfare.

Why is clubbing baby seals more controversial than hunting white-tailed deer or slaughtering chickens? One reason, of course, is that nearly everyone in the developed world eats chicken sometimes and many people hunt white-tailed deer, but almost no one can afford baby seal fur, so it’s essentially costless to object to.

Another reason is that clubbing baby seals looks really gross. I’ll save you the pictures, but even the strongest stomach turns at the image of a club splattered with the blood and brains of an adorable baby animal with soft fuzzy fur and big warm eyes. Of course, clubbing seals is gross for the same reason that it leads to better welfare: if her brains are on a club, an animal is pretty definitely dead.

It’s very important, when we think about animal welfare, not to go with our knee-jerk reactions. We might naturally object more to the mistreatment of cute baby animals, but all animals are equally deserving of a happy life and a quick painless death—whether they’re gross, scary, or highly upvoted on r/aww. We might think something is wrong because it disgusts us, but death is inherently a disgusting process. There’s no reason to assume that the death that looks clean is the one best for the animal. There’s no substitute for careful, species-specific research grounded in the experience of the individual animal.

1. Technically clubbing or using a hakapik, but I’m eliding the difference, since it’s irrelevant to my readers, who presumably aren’t planning to go out clubbing baby seals any time soon.