Signed, Sealed and Delivered In Error

It fascinates me that many European politicians have just involved themselves in getting the killing of seals banned almost completely without, apparently, thinking about the fact that they have just voted to ensure that the competition for the world's dwindling fish stocks heats back up again.

These people want to be able to have childern and grandchildren, all of whom will need to eat and, at the same time stop other creatures that are competing directly for the same foodstuffs from being culled.

Please don't misunderstand me - I would like to insist that no creature's life be sacrificed so that mankind might thrive - especially now that so much of mankind has become so utterly vile. Since I have no living children and never will have any, I am plagued by no conflict of interests in this matter. I can afford to want all living creatures to have equal rights with me.

If I were a parent, matters would be very different. I would be obliged to weigh up the importance of protecting other living creatures against the importance of seeing to it that my offspring flourished and it doesn't take a genius to know which I would choose.

A compromise would have been sensible. The Inuits should have been offered a means of killing seals painlessly - lethal injection perhaps - not told to let all seals live and accept the fact that their own starvation would probably result before too long.

Letting all those seals live will soon result in seas devoid of fish and the seals will respond by starving slowly, just as the Inuits are expected to do in order to save the seals for a slower demise later.

Just as the fox hunting ban was imposed by people who had no idea what the whole thing was about and how much worse things would become for everyone in the countryside, including the average fox, as a result of their meddling, so now the seal-hunting ban will bring misery upon man and beast alike.