Signed, Sealed, and Dismembe red
Hunt , produced by
Shea & Associates for the International Fund for Animal Welfare.
The Canadian seal hunt is
back, and so are the protesters. Hunt , produced by political ad maker
Mike Shea for the International Fund for Animal Welfare, is part of an
unprecedented effort to increase public awareness before spring and the next
hunting season. Polls show that once informed of the facts, between 80 percent
and 90 percent of Canadians and Americans oppose the killing. Hunt ,
hopes its makers, will give its viewers those facts and rouse them to
action.
The spot opens with a
moist-eyed white seal pup on the ice. "Think this little fellow is safe?" asks
the narrator, the camera zooming to a close-up of the animal's eye, in which a
club-brandishing hunter is now silhouetted. As the pup attempts futilely to
escape, we are given the numbers. Up to half a million seals, most of them pups
under a year old, were killed by commercial hunters in Canada last year (a key
study by economist Clive Southey offered a lower figure--269,000--that has been
contested).
A Canadian flag dissolves on
a bloody ice field as the sealer drags the pup away. The image of the
government's complicity is a powerful one: Southey's study claims that the hunt
adds little value, especially once government subsidies (on which Canadian
taxpayers spent $3.4 million just in 1996) are subtracted. The end does not
justify the means, says the spot, cutting first to a Toronto Globe and
Mail headline--"Sealers convicted for cruel slaughter"--and then to a shot
of an abandoned carcass. The IFAW has videotaped atrocities, and while we are
not made to witness a skinning or an impaling, we hear the pup crying and see
hooks waving. (And though the spot never really tells us that these crimes are
ignored by the authorities, there have been reports to that effect.)
The seals are victims not of
research or of subsistence hunting, says Hunt , but of an unsubstantiated
claim that their penises increase human potency ("totally inexcusable" in "what
is supposed to be an enlightened age," actor William Shatner, one of a growing
cast of luminaries who have signed on to the IFAW cause, has been quoted as
saying). We see a shot of a bustling Asian market, followed by one of a seal
group on the ice. (The juxtaposition is familiar enough, and reaches for the
emotional energy of other battles between environmentalists and apparently
impervious consumers. But the portrayal of the transaction in question is
interesting: The clerk is Asian, but the customer is white.)
The spot ends with the image
of a white-coat pup, a phone number, and an explicit exhortation. The animal
can't stop this, but you can. The 1996 numbers represent a fivefold increase
over previous annual takes, which had plateaued at 55,000 after mass
international protest drove them down in the early 1970s. Until 1995, that is.
Dwindling cod populations in the waters off Newfoundland inspired the federal
Department of Fisheries and Oceans to raise annual hunt quotas on harp and
hooded seals to 275,000. Echoing the classical political appeal to "speak for
those who have no voice," Hunt hopes your conscience will win the
day.
--Robert
Shrum
