I was in Europe a short time back, and I went toe to toe with some of the politicians on the hunt issue itself. Some of the MPs from Great Britain were actually sympathetic, yet they would never say they were sympathetic to our cause because they know their constituents feel we're being cruel barbarians and what not.
One of the things that catches their ear and actually sort of changes their minds was not going fact for fact, as Rene pointed out. Rene had a good point about doing what we have done before and using logic to overcome emotion. What worked on them was using emotion.
They had this long explanation about how, for first nations, it was a part of their history, yet we don't tell them the story about how it's our history as well. Yes, okay, we're settlers. At the same time, we have well over a hundred years of tradition in this. The fact is that we say to them that we are culturally linked to this, that we're not out there to harvest these animals and to kill whatever's in sight. We respect nature and we respect the fact that the animal is at this level.
They've said we're killing seals at this level. Their biggest argument is that we're killing seals at the level we did back in the fifties, when the population was down. What they don't say is that the population back then was two million, but now we're close to six million. It's a different story entirely when you point this stuff out, but we tie in the emotional aspect of it.
