Review of Wenzel’s Animal Rights, Human Rights

Wenzel, George. 1991. Animal Rights, Human Rights: Ecology, Economy and Ideology in the Canadian Arctic. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 206 pp., bibliograpy.

Alx Dark (1992)

George Wenzel is an anthropologist and geographer who has conducted research among the Clyde River Inuit over the last twenty years, including detailed studies of their contemporary hunting practices. His discussion of the anti-seal fur campaigns of the late 1970s and 1980s provides a solid argument for why hunting remains an important activity for the Inuit today, and his work deserves a wide readership in the environmental community. This review briefly summarizes some of the events and arguments of Wenzel’s work.

Before 1983, the anti-sealing campaign had been largely conducted with little success out on the Newfoundland ice, where baby pup seals were clubbed to death for their fur and the fur garment industry. Further to the north, however, Inuit hunters continued to hunt adult seals for food. They sold the adult seal skins in order to provision the snowmobiles, rifles, gasoline and ammunition that are essential to Inuit subsistence hunting activities. Before 1983, Inuit communities were already feeling the effects of the anti-sealing campaign as their furs brought lower prices at the local Hudson’s Bay Company or Co-op store. Although the northern Inuit had little access to information on the political battles proceeding in the south (television only came to the area in 1980, and radio broadcasts were rare), the Inuit generally believed the conflict was due to the misunderstanding of their position by the anti-sealing movement, as they saw a clear distinction between their own subsistence hunting and the southern, more commercial hunt. Wenzel writes that “the Inuit saw a simple answer to this problem: that the protest explain to other Qallunaat [whites] that Inuit sealed to live” (p. 147). The Inuit were thus not antagonistic to the anti-sealing campaign or to its potential effect on the Newfoundland commercial seal hunt, which was the central focus of the anti-sealing campaign’s concern.

Wenzel provides convincing evidence that although both Greenpeace and the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) knew that the sealing boycott was having an adverse effect on Inuit communities, they chose to refrain from altering their boycott tactics to exempt Inuit communities and allow them to continue selling adult seal skins. Until 1985, no representative from either group met with Inuit in the north (elsewhere, contact between animal rights representatives and Inuit representatives apparently led to little if any communication between the two; pp. 145-52). Although the Inuit appeared to be willing to clarify their position on the boycott, they were never given this chance. Rather, as Wenzel argues, the groups behind the protests had already judged Inuit subsistence hunting according to their own criteria, and considered the Inuit to be no different in any respect from other, commercial hunting operations. They were to be included in the boycott. When in 1983 the lobbying of the European Parliment by Greenpeace and IFAW resulted in a European boycott of seal furs, the Inuit were further devastated and animosity between the two groups, Inuit and protesters, made reconciliation unlikely.

Indeed, instead of reconciliation, the Inuit have watched as animal rights activists and environmentalists have widened the range of their grievances against hunting peoples. The 1985 Greenpeace International delegation to Greenland “rebuffed Inuit requests for help and urged them to face historical reality” (p. 151), a reality that Greenpeace had worked to create without consulting the Inuit. Responses to the effects of the boycott upon the Inuit have been similarly shaped by historical presuppositions. Animal rights activists claim that the Inuit are no different from any other fur sealers, largely because “the animal rights representatives define the conditions of Inuit traditionalness in terms of identifiers from the past” (p. 166). These identifiers, as we might expect, draw from Euroamerican perceptions of how Inuit lived in pre-historical times. Thus, since the fur trade is not “traditional,” Inuit voluntary participation in it appears morally suspect, and proof, along with the purchase of consumer goods and the use of rifle and snowmobile in hunting, that the Inuit are assimilated and hunt merely to acquire money. Once technological innovation has been mistaken for cultural assimilation, “the moral power of the protest’s stance on consumptive wildlife” is no longer “threatened by the opposition of Native Northerners seeking cultural sovereignty,” but in order to achieve this, the animal rights movement in particular has gone further, and argued that subsistence hunting in Canada amounts to little more than a cynical strategy to further land claims (p. 161). The animal rights movement thus finds itself claiming the “enlightened” pursuit of “historical reality” in battling all cultures where hunting has remained a viable part of a people’s activities, as in the ban on Aleut use of fur seals in 1986 or the current attempt to ban leg-hold traps which would affect Dene and Cree hunters [as of 1991].

The rhetoric of assimilation has, as it has in the past, reached quite racist proportions. Stephen Best, an animal rights activist, simply concludes, “The Native people have got to become self-sufficient. They have got to have their own culture that is living. I own the Native culture. I bought it with my taxes. I own about two-thirds of it” (p. 167). In effect, Best dismisses American Indians and their concerns whatever their position within environmental or animal rights debates. In this situation, it is of course impossible to tell what communication between member groups of the anti-sealing campaign and Inuit might have achieved, but it is clear that the present animosity is a result of the antagonistic attitude of some environmental groups towards the Inuit and the consequent lack of communication that attitude enforces. It is not surprising, as Wenzel notes, that “the movement’s own dogmatic stance provided the basis for Inuit joining the fur industry and government in the countercoalition activists now face. In this regard, and as much as the movement may point an accusing finger at such an ’alliance,’ it was its uncompromising and culturally biased interpretation of what now constitutes traditional aboriginal subsistence, its ethos of shared social solidarity, that led to the gulf that now exists between Inuit and animal rightists” (p. 183).