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Friday, February 5, 2010

Student Loans and Sealing

A couple recent Stories from the Nanaimo Daily News that I thought I would comment on.

Students plead for a break on loan interest

Sealing awareness campaign will lack perspective

What can I say about student loans? If you are not the beneficiary of them then as you will read in the comments below the story linked above you may not understand the difficulty some people have in paying them back. Me, I graduated in 2002 with a Child & Youth Care degree and $56,000 in student loans. In a couple ways I was lucky; one being I had stopped getting loans in 2000, otherwise I would likely have owed over $70,000; two, I had been under the remission qualifier program which meant as long as I graduated in as timely manner I qualified. The latter resulted, upon my graduation and submission of paperwork, in a total forgiveness of my BC student loans to the tune of $22,000. Had this not happened I would have been required to pay over $700 a month in payments but as it is I now only have to pay $300 a month over a 15 year term. Despite having paid over $25,000 since 2002 I still owe another $22,000 so I figure that by the time the loan is paid off the bill will be well over $60,000 and possibly as high or higher than twice the original $34,000. I am one of the lucky ones in that I can somewhat afford to pay but I tell you it ain’t easy and because I am always late in my payments it has really screwed up my credit rating.

Sealing protests? I fully support the protesters and if you read Robert Barron’s story, I usually like what he has to say, and have even the slightest bit of intelligence you will be able to read between the lines. No one wants to stop indigenous peoples from hunting for their livelihood and that is not the wholesale slaughter that people are protesting against. Mr. Barron talks about the seal harvest as food but other than those taken by First Nations the vast majority of the carcasses are left t0o rot on the ice with their mothers having looked on while their babies were killed simply for their fur. Mr Barron then has the audacity to compare the killing of baby seals to humanities insatiable lust for McDonalds and Kentucky Fried Chicken.

“But killing animals for food, clothing and other uses has been an ongoing human activity since we first walked the plains of Africa millions of years ago and most of us, including many of the people who will attend Nanaimo's protest with Sparky, have no problems eating meat products or wearing leather. The anti-sealing groups have become very successful in their efforts to separate the seal hunt from the slaughter of pigs and cows that occur daily in abattoirs in every neighbourhood across Canada and the world by appealing to human emotions, rather than basing their campaign on hard, cold facts.”

Give me a freakin break Robert this is in no way even remotely the same and lest ye forget there are many animal rights groups that protest the way food is treated prior to becoming food. The killing of baby seals for monetary gain is plain and simply wrong.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I don't understand how you think that killing baby seals is "plain wrong" and say it's totally different from killing cows/pigs/etc.

So is keeping cows from exercising so they don't gain muscle, then killing them for food any better? Do you eat or condone the consuming of veal?

Seals, cows, pigs, chicken, all the same to me. Wish others could see the hypocrisy in protesting one things but condoning similar actions.

David Stanley said...

You're right Gord. Robert Barron's article was way off the mark. It's an old trick of the pro-sealing lobby to try to confuse the native and commercial seal hunts when the two are totally different. The Inuit hunt relatively small numbers of adult seals and use every part of the animals. The commercial seal hunters slaughter hundreds of thousands of seal pups for their fur, leaving everything else to rot on the ice. Protesters demonstrating against the seal hunt are only concerned with the commercial seal hunt, not the Inuit hunt. When politicians play the Inuit card on the seal hunting issue they are only exploiting the Inuit (as usual) and trying to confuse the public.

......... Gord Fuller ......... said...

Anonymous.

The killing of baby seals is fundamentaly different than the killing of cows/pigs/etc.. The seal slaughter is simply for pelts and in no way about food. It is done in most cases with the mother looking on and staying with the skinned carcass for a time afterwards. Domesticated food production is far different from this but that said I in no way condone the mistreatment of these animals either. I will leave the prottesting of such to others though in the event of a rally in Nanaimo I would attend to support their cause. No I don't eat veal and for that matter fois gras either but I do eat meat and will continue to do so. When aware of mistreatment of the foods I consume I will no longer purchase the products made by those doing the mistreating.