Cute

Today's pointless photo isn't all that bad, by the way, when you consider that I was taking it handheld through a window in fairly low light conditions.

Anyway.

I'm hoping to keep this rant brief, but we'll see how it goes.

I've been watching Anthony Bourdain on twitter taking on a group of chefs who've signed a petition boycotting Canadian seafood until the government bans the seal hunt. It's been interesting. There's pros and cons on both sides, of course. I can't deny that the way the seal hunt is done is cruel, but I also can't deny that the hunt is sustainable and that seal overpopulation has a huge effect on everything from cod stocks to the number of sharks that are draw in towards human-frequented beaches. Bourdain's taking the First Nations approach, in that banning the seal hunt directly affects the lives and livelihood of Inuit families who depend on it. He should know, and better than those chefs who signed the petition without doing any research. He's at least seen an Inuit hunt. And eaten the meat, to boot.

All of that's neither here nor there for me, though. As I said, pros and cons on both sides. What gets my back up more than anything is the fact that 95% (well, ok, I'm guessing on the number) of the people who protest the seal hunt are only protesting it because baby seals are cute.

Seriously.

Can you honestly say that people around the (Western) world would even care about this if baby seals looked like flounders? Or even if they looked like baby pigeons, which have to be some of the homeliest babies out there.

I get so tired of the cute factor in popular conservation. It appeals to the instinctual need to save babies, yes, and obviously gets a response, but it sends the wrong message. Pandas are cute; let's save them. Polar bears are cute (and deadly); let's save them. Sharks aren't cute; let's let people continue to overharvest them for their fins (fins only, mind. The rest of the shark isn't used) until we suddenly realise that it's almost too late for several species...

Cute isn't going to save anything in the end, folks. It makes people spend too much time and too much money trying to save cute things that in the end may not even be able to be saved (see: polar bears). In the meantime, while we run around saving the cute posterchildren we're losing habitat all over the world. Rain forest, grassland, ocean reefs; it's all kind of depressing to me that well-meaning people are working so hard to save cute while the places that cute AND ugly can actually live are disappearing.

I've thought for years -- and I'm not the only one in the environment business that thinks this -- that unless we can get people to realise that saving whole systems is what's important and that they need to drop the SAVE THE *insert cute animal here* rallying cry, no one's going to understand that the cute, apparently petable things can't live in isolation. They're all part of a web of interdependence. The cute things are important, the ugly things are important, the inoffensive-but-sort-of-boring things are important, the places they live are important, and until the whole thing goes tits up we'll never realise just how important the whole thing -- not just the cute part of it -- is to us.

So am I saying you shouldn't care about cute things? Well, no. Just don't make the mistake of thinking that a cute thing is all there is to care about. Get educated. Don't go off half-cocked. Understand that there may be more to an issue than the cute things before you put your name to a petition and get a pat on the back from a lobbying organisation whose agenda is to get money from people who like to protect cute things.

Don't fall for the cuteness. The rest of issue's important too.