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发表于 2009-6-1 13:01:19
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转贴 Indigenous hunting cultures are not the ones responsible
转贴 Indigenous hunting cultures are not the ones responsible
最近加拿大总督大人 她支持原住民猎杀海豹的传统的举动。一再引起那些 “吃饱了，没有事干” 的非议，也引来有识之仕的积极回应，媒体里 不乏有真正“良心”，和“正义“ 高论。 这里转发一篇。 希望能够为本网猎友，储备些 “说法”。 以备不时之需！
http://www.vancouversun.com/spor ... /1641896/story.html
http://www.vancouversun.com/spor ... /1641896/story.html
http://www.pressdisplay.com/pressdisplay/viewer.aspx
News flash: The Inuit may be more at risk than seals
Indigenous hunting cultures are not the ones responsible for declining numbers of many species
By Stephen Hume, Vancouver SunMay 29, 2009Comments (67)
Animal rights enthusiasts are again in high dudgeon, this time because Canadian Gov.-Gen. Michaelle Jean ate a raw morsel of seal heart at an Inuit feast in Rankin Inlet and pronounced it good. Critics expressed disgust but their high-minded outrage deserves context.
First, the governor-general represents all Canadians, not just urban café society with sufficient income to indulge in the luxury of causes and strictly organic vegan diets -- as distinct from those forced to less lofty alternatives. Yes, this is a class conflict, too.
Now, I'm not demeaning animal rights. I'm for them. Nor do I belittle vegetarians. I live with one. I do propose caution in rushing to denounce other people's cultural values on the basis of our prejudices.
The G-G's constituency includes indigenous hunting cultures, which survive at the margin of mainstream Canada. Considering that 80 per cent of Canada's population is urban and lives within 300 kilometres of the U.S. border, that's a lot of margin. All these hunting societies depend to some extent upon the supplementary harvest of game for subsistence. Small surprise that traditional foods are crucial to the ceremonial celebration of values that ensures their survival as distinct indigenous cultures.
For Canada's top official to spurn such an offering would be a profound insult, a consideration to which her critics seem curiously indifferent. Michaelle Jean was not indifferent.
In British Columbia, the ceremonial sharing of salmon is the foundation of cultural identity among aboriginal peoples whose right to the harvest predates mainstream society's by millennia and which has been recognized in law since Canada's founding. Our earliest treaties enshrine the native right to hunt and fish. Only conservation trumps this aboriginal right.
But the biggest threat to the salmon comes not from aboriginal people; not from mainstream commercial and recreational fishing. It comes from habitat destruction: roads, dams, urban sprawl, water diversions, pollution, agriculture, logging, mining, storm drains, auto exhausts, flushing toilets, dumping your coffee, the medications that persist in human urine.
That destruction is part of the footprint of a vast, growth-based economy in which animal rights advocates -- along with the rest of us -- are so deeply embedded that they can no more extricate themselves than they can run their publicity campaigns by mental telepathy.
Some say it's unethical for Inuit hunters to hunt with rifles and market surplus seal pelts. Then it must be equally unethical for animal rights crusaders to use computers, work from wood or concrete structures, eat cereals, ride bicycles or take public transit -- all of which contribute to habitat loss.
In the Canadian Arctic, Inuit hunters remain close to their traditional origins, some communities having encountered Europeans for the first time in the 1930s. I'd venture that there's as much reverence for animals in the average Inuit hunter as there is in any animal rights activist.
More significantly, a diet rich in sea mammals, caribou and migratory birds is the healthiest available. Medical research shows indisputably that the traditional Inuit diet offers remarkable natural protection against the two great scourges of mainstream society -- cancer and heart disease.
Furthermore, it's affordable. The Arctic is extraordinarily poor in vegetal resources. The kind of diet that vegan animal rights enthusiasts espouse is simply unattainable, precluded by the prohibitive expense of importing alien foods to remote settlements.
In Iqaluit, a box of fresh orange juice retailed not so long ago for more than $20. A litre of apple juice can top $5. Fresh milk costs up to $4 a litre. Wild meat, fish and fowl is a nutritious bargain by comparison.
Second, aboriginal communities -- reasonably, in my view -- perceive attacks upon their hunting rights as a new incremental manifestation of the old imperialism. Colonization began with land, moved to religion, then language, then the appropriation of art. The more militant discern moves to reduce their hunting rights as creeping cultural genocide. They have an arguable point.
A governor-general who graciously accepted the offer of a traditional delicacy at a feast as a way of affirming Inuit culture seems undeserving of criticism from a mainstream society that last year commercially slaughtered more than 700 million cattle, pigs, sheep, turkeys, chickens and other animals. And that was just Canada.
There are 10 million seals in Canada and 50,000 Inuit. Seals outnumber Inuit by 200 to one. In the bigger picture, given the intolerance of the animal rights lobby, perhaps the Inuit deserve to be considered more at risk than the seals.
shume@islandnet.com
© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun
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