This is a cull plain and simple. Please appreciate the specific and God-given role of the predator in nature. It's natural and it is sublime.
The cubs are adorable. It makes nature's wrath that much harder to comprehend.
I don't make up the rules of nature. I just observe, interpret and marvel. Rest assured that if man did not intervene, another entity would.
It would be best to just ignore the seal cub happenstance. Any human intervention to stop the culling would certainly lead to far greater short-term hardship on the cubs, as is the normal vector.
Of these thing, I do not know why. It just is and any human intervention tends to complicate the situation with more dire circumstances for the indigenous animal population.
It is not. In a true, humane cull, such things as poisoned darts would be used. The targets would be adults, breeding-aged females mostly, and older males. The temptation to make a quick buck would be removed by strict regulation and policing of the process.
Not here. Here we have a situation where there is money to be made. So, we kill infants (better coats!) with a club so as not to ruin the hides. Oh, and if it's not dead, well, skin it anyway! Forget the adults. They make up some Bravo Sierra about protecting the fishing stocks (from their NATURAL predators, LOL!) that they themselves have depleted to provide a thin cover. The whole enterprise is sleazy beyond belief.
it's no better, really, than when the Zimbabwean government claimed it needed to "cull" elephants...which it did with machine guns and then hacked out the tusks, which were sold for ivory, gaining big $$$. They killed entire family units and left most of them to rot.
Clubbing seals for money is not "predation", it's degradation. A predator eats what it kills in order to survive. Predators do not parade around in the skin of what it has killed. The only animal that kills more than it needs and then wears the skins beyond the necessity of survival in the elements, is Man.
BTW, this so-called culling is excused on the grounds that the seals are eating all the fish, but the article makes mention of the fact the reduction in fish population may be due to over-fishing. Could it be that the "clubbers" are the very same fishermen that deplete their own resource and then blame the depletion of fish on the seals so they can go club the seals to make up for their lack of husbandry.
What was the fish-to-seal balance before man came along? Someone is not telling the truth, ignoring known facts, or both. The clubbers probably vote "Labor" in Canada.