History of seal skin sporrans

[Fit2BKilted]

Why exactly is seal skin illegal?

To be honest, IMHO there is NO reason, other than some fringe animal rights groups needed a new cause-celebre back in the 1970's, and they jumped at the opportunity to "defend" a very "cute" animal from the "barbarism" that is subsistence-hunting. This was made all-too-easy by the short-sighted and ignorant White hunters who were capitalizing on the fur-market, and took to harvesting seals indiscriminately before there were any hunting regulations on the species (correct me if I'm wrong). Footage of wholesale slaughter of the relatively helpless (out of the water) aquatic creatures for their pelts, with their corpses left to rot in pools of blood on the ice-floes made for "great TV" which culminated in the European Ban this year.

It is my belief that this would not have been an issue if non-subsistence hunters had been banned in the first-place, as the Inuit would then have been handed a monopoly on the production of seal-pelts, and the scarcity of supply would have driven the price up high-enough that they would be in a more advantageous economic position---provided they had the sense to form a seal-pelt co-op that would bargain for the best prices on their behalf---to increase their standard of living (which is nonetheless still higher than that of many "southern" Native Americans AFAIK). I won't get into the other social factors that plague the Northern Peoples (viz., religious evangelism, residential schooling, lack of social infrastructure, etc., etc.) because I've flown too close to the sun already.