Easy on the bludgeoning, heavy on the mayo

As if we haven't suffered enough, Sir Paul and the Her Whineness aren't giving up their efforts to stop this year's Canadian seal hunt, scheduled to begin tomorrow morning. In these final hours, I won't be at all surprised if they resort to some sort of ice floe sing-in, or a publicity stunt where Heather tries to pin daisies to the hunters' parkas. Or something involving the mock clubbing of ketchup-filled Cabbage Patch dolls.

Now, as my comments to a most hilarious related post imply, I'm not a fan of the seal hunt. As a visual, it's harsh and icky. Like footage of Ben Mulroney, but with more blood. (Speaking of which, if the hunters had any PR sense, they'd inject the seals with blue food colouring beforehand. Then media images of the hunting grounds would look less like a scene from the Shining and more like the aftermath of a grape slushie machine mishap. Much easier to stomach. Dare I say, purpleicylicious?)

But provided it's done humanely and is sustainable from a conservation perspective, I say: have at 'er! That is, so long as I don't have to watch. Or clean up afterwards.

This happens be precisely the same approach I take to the idea of elderly people having sex (which, if you've seen old Paul these days, is not completely irrelevant to this discussion). But even more relevant than that, it happens to also be the approach I implicitly take when I chow down on commercially raised beef, pork or poultry. The hunter slaughters, I slather. The farmer guts, I grill. In the combined words of INXS front-man JD Fortune and grease-guru Colonel Saunders, "It ain't pretty [but] it's finger-lickin' good."

Which is all a very indirect and space-filling way of getting to this: Lady Heather's website promotes the US Humane Society's own stop the hunt campaign. All fine and lacking in irony -- except that the HSUS site flogs such socially-responsible swag as shirts bearing the painfully clever slogan "Club Sandwiches Not Seals."

Got that? Club sandwiches: lettuce, tomato, bacon... turkey.

But surely not those tortured toeless toms featured in a certain PSA, eh Heather? 'Cause that would be selling out the turkeys to save the seals.

And that would be cold. Tasty, but cold.

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