Moral Tales and the damned seal hunt, two years later

[edenfalling]

Oh god love a duck. Tomorrow is the wounded seal lesson, which comes with special bonus by the way, Canadian seal hunting is EVIL!!! wording built into the story introduction. Which I objected to when I taught this lesson back in 2011, and still object to now. Last time it ended up all right, so I suppose if I am healthy enough to teach at all tomorrow I will just chop that stuff out again when I introduce the story. But seriously, ugh.

You can teach empathy without demonizing hunting, you know! In fact, demonizing hunting shows a remarkable lack of empathy! For instance, I would really like to know what the Seal Hunter in the story did to keep himself and his family and village alive if he stopped hunting seals. He was hunting them for food and clothing, after all, and it's damned hypocritical and short-sighted not to point out the troubles he must have had after he threw away his livelihood.

Also, seals hunt and eat fish. Why do we not have a story where a fish comes and makes a seal feel guilty for killing the other members of its school? And then the seal becomes a vegetarian and somehow doesn't starve to death because righteousness miraculously provides? Oh right, because fish aren't fluffy and cute, that's why. Fucking selkie myths and pure white fur and big melty black eyes.

I hate this lesson plan so much.

At least this year we are skipping the Faith in Action protest letter bullshit. The national curriculum hasn't changed, but I guess I made a convincing case to our DRE in 2011. Yay for progress?

Comments

[branchandroot]

Wait, wait, so this is not "how the commercial fur-hunter decided the world could freaking well make do with synthetics", this is "let's shame the only remaining livelihood of the First Nations that our past ancestors and current government are in the process of slowly killing in POW camps if they don't agree to completely assimilate"? And this is supposed to be a /moral tale/? O_O

[sapote]

The seal hunter is in Scotland in 1882, which I'm sure has a whole bunch of other weird socioeconomic judgments attached that I would not know about because I'm not from Victorian Scotland. It's basically a selkie story, I guess?

[branchandroot]

Okay, that's somewhat less horrifying. ...still kind of weird considering the general "kidnap a bride" tenor of most selkie stories I'm aware of, but I'm assuming that got bowdlerized out.

[edenfalling]

It is entirely possible that there are versions of this story in which the "companion" seal -- the woman who pulls the seal hunter over a cliff and down into the seals' hidden palace so he can heal her father and feel guilty as hell -- is actually the hunter's wife and therefore he attempted to kill his father-in-law... but that is exactly the kind of thing that would get bowdlerized out, yeah.

[krait]

this is "let's shame the only remaining livelihood of the First Nations

...Wow, that is some fail right there!

Even as a wee teenage budding animal-rights activist I could discern that there was a difference between Julie's dad in Julie of the Wolves bringing home a seal to eat & make a coat from, and the infamous commercial seal hunts (of animals whose environment is fragmenting rapidly) for an ever-declining pelt market and meat that ends up in dog food. *eyerolling*

Kill things and eat/wear them, by all means, if that's what you've got to survive on. Feel bad (or about it if you want to, by all means; feelings are okay! I'd be more worried if you didn't have some Thoughts about killing something. (And really, as a biology major: the difference between that cute fuzzy seal and, say, a salmon are pretty small. They're both living, thinking vertebrates with a well-developed nervous system; if you're okay with clubbing and eating one and not the other, go sit down and think on that for a while.)

[edenfalling]

Yes, but salmon are not fluffy and don't have adorable dark eyes. It's the Bambi effect. And also probably that salmon is a known and culturally accepted food product in the US, particularly among affluent people, whereas seal meat is unfamiliar and therefore creepy. I have seen this effect before in my own family, actually -- my mom finds the idea of eating venison or rabbit weird and offputting, even though they are perfectly fine meats and people have been eating them for millennia. Come to think of it, I find the idea of eating guinea pigs vaguely offputting, but they are raised for food in South America, so. Knee-jerk cultural taboos, I guess.

[edenfalling]

The theme of the lesson is empathy -- feeling what another person is feeling and therefore not wanting to hurt them. My suspicion is that someone on the curiculum committee wanted to extend that from "other humans" to "other beings" and found this folktale of a human feeling empathy for seals, at which point someone else said, "Oh, let me show you pictures of fluffy baby seals with blood spilling out of their brains, which I found online and didn't realize are twenty years out of date!" and it kind of ended up in a well-meaning clusterfuck. :-( Especially since killing harp seals when they are still white and fluffy is, in fact, illegal (at least in Canada since 1987), and harp seals are rated Least Concern by the IUCN, which puts them in the same "not endangered at all!" category as humans, ironically enough. We'd do more good for seals by protesting the overfishing of cod than protesting the direct hunting of seals.

But cod are not fluffy, I guess.

[branchandroot]

*facepalm* Yeah, that sounds like a committee clusterfuck all right. Which, of course, take /forever/ to get reviewed or undo.

[sapote]

Haha, oh, bless, I just read through the curriculum and it seriously jumps right from "and then they magically became selkies and played in the ocean waves" to "Canadian seal hunting in the 21st century is a BAD PLAN" with no context, huh. I was raised UU and still would be involved if I didn't work Sundays, and just, sometimes for the church with the most PhDs per capita we did a really bad job of backing up our romantic points about mother nature. Your solution of modeling respectful disagreement is really cool, though!

[edenfalling]

Yeah, pretty much. The intro to the story is basically, "Canadian seal hunting is BAD, and now I will illustrate that with a Scottish folktale," ...which does not exactly follow logically. *headdesk* So I introduced the story by talking about empathy and understanding someone else's feelings (and that some people do this automatically and emotionally, while others have to think about it, and both methods are fine and valid), and afterwards my co-teacher and I talked about vegetarianism and veganism, and how animals kill and eat other animals (and plants), and how you can't live and let live with everything (illustrated with the example of infectious diseases), and that everyone will find their own line between what they feel is okay and what isn't, but the point is to think about it.

And then musical hula-hoops, because you can only get kids to be serious for so long at that age. *wry*

[akatsuki210.livejournal.com]

The main issue I have with the protests against seal-hunting in Canada is that, IIRC, many of the people who participate in such hunting are of Inuit descent. While I do like seals (and I'm not sure if some species might be endangered?), I think it's problematic for a largely Caucasian population to tell indigenous people that they can't/shouldn't preserve their cultural traditions.

[edenfalling]

Harp seals -- the species mentioned in the "Faith in Action" protest letter -- are rated Least Concern by the IUCN, which means they are not endangered; in fact, they are not even considered threatened. (Humans are also ranked "Least Concern," for reference!) So far as I can tell, their biggest human-caused problems are entirely related to climate change and to human fishing rather than human hunting -- we kill more of them indirectly by taking away their food sources and breeding grounds than we do directly. A protest againt overfishing cod would do harp seals more good than any protest against seal hunting.