Designer doggies and baby seals

With regard to the latest seal hunt ban, the European Union has spoken. No seal products allowed to be sold there: no flippers, leather, fur or even omega-3 seal oil pills.

But in the long run, Newfoundlanders and Westerners in general only have ourselves to blame when it comes to animals these days.

Why? We owe it to animals to treat them as humanely as possible, and to punish those who abuse them.

But on the other end of the spectrum, many are guilty of "anthropomorphizing" critters - treating them less with the natural dignity that Mother Nature gave them in the first place and seeing them instead as mutant miniature humans.

It's a mentality that results in people elevating their pets to a status that many actual humans throughout the world don't have. While millions live in poverty on the world's continents, others are buying designer products for their pooches and kitties (but at the same time don't do enough to help the critters in animal shelters) and toting them around left, right and centre.

"But Fluffy and Fido are like my children!" Well then, put a Pamper on your pooch when you take him out for walks.

On a more sinister bent, said critter becomes an extension of the owner. That's why you get "my Doberman/Rottweiler/bull mastiff/any large dog wouldn't hurt little Jamie" but then little Jamie gets his face torn off by said creature, because the owner refuses to recognize that deep down inside, part of that animal's heart belongs to the wild despite millennia of domestication.

Extrapolate that mentality to wild critters and welcome to the "Awww, ain't he/she cute?" factor. We complain about coyotes who've moved into the neighbourhood, but at least we don't have to deal with raccoons. Many people, upon seeing those bandit-like creatures, think they're cute. So they are, but they're worse than seagulls when it comes to attacking your garbage. Or the sappy "Christian the lion" YouTube video where two men release the animal they originally bought at Harrods in London to the wild and go to Africa to visit it years later. People oohed and awed over the lion, but at the same time dozens of species go extinct or are endangered by human carelessness.

That's the big reason why harp seal pups became beloved by yahoos: they became "baby seals" who "cried thick tears" and the legions of the stupid wanted to caress them. Guess what. They're not "babies," they don't cry tears of emotion but the same kind of tears that many mammals produce to protect their eyes in extreme cold. And every human who petted a seal pup condemned the animal to starvation because with the scent of a human, the mother wouldn't recognize it. Harps aren't the Einsteins of the animal world. One wonders if the Mauritus dodos - an early example of wanton human destructiveness - would be alive today if they were cute and cuddly.

The awesome great white shark is in big trouble thanks to humans. This ultimate predator can trace its lineage back 400 million years. But great whites aren't cute, so the EU and animal rights groups don't care about them.?

We know the EU is hypocritical. They're up in arms about seals because of an aging sex kitten called Brigitte Bardot, yet they don't care about the European freezer-trawlers, which will make cod commercially extinct. They see nothing wrong with patÉ de foie gras where the French force-feed geese to make their livers tasty by sticking a funnel down their throats and pouring grain in nonstop. Geese don't have a gag reflex, unlike humans (unlike kegger yahoos in beer chugalugs. "Look at my imitation of a French goose, Johnny!")

But in the long run, when we fawn on cute animals and treat our pets as miniature people, it's no wonder that clueless people want to save the seals.