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by koldkanuck on January 6th, 2008

koldkanuck

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My great grandpa told me a story when I was little about native peoples roaming the prairies slaughtering the buffalo, Is this true? If so why such a fuss because the innuit kill seals?

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  • by Keysha on March 21st, 2008

    Keysha

    Native Americans killed buffalo for food and clothing. The white man is who came in and slaughtered them by the thousands. Native Americans used spear, bow and arrow, and knife to kill these huge, dangerous animals, and yes, they are dangerous. Walk up to one that is not tamed and see. On occasion, a group of braves would run a small herd off a cliff, so there would be meat for the entire village. They would smoke the meat they did not eat right away so it was preserved.

    Killing seals is most often done for profit. They go into a rookery with clubs and start swinging on the baby seals. Then they skin them, when the animal is often not dead, only stunned. The carcasses are not taken for food, rather they are left on the beaches for other animals to eat or to rot.

    THAT is the difference.

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  • by Atillion on January 6th, 2008

    Atillion

    If they're on a path for extinction, then there would be a fuss about ANYONE killing them. Are they?

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  • by B. Krayzee - Dirrty Professor @ Large on March 22nd, 2008

    B. Krayzee - Dirrty Professor @ Large

    Long ago, people did what they had to do to survive. Killing to find food is different from wholesale slaughter. The Natives on the planes and prairies needed food and clothing to live so they did what they needed to do, there were no grocery stores and such.
    Zoom ahead to modern times, were we DO have stores and such. Now that doesn't happen that way and animals are bred expressly for the purpose of producing food. We are now all aware of nature and life in general and have become more sensitive to it on every level. Every thing has a place in the cirle of life even bugs. The killing of things like Whales and Seals and other wild animals only contributes to their removal from the chain and thusly set us all up for eventual disaster because it's one thing for a species to fall victim to natural selection and be removed (like the dinos) and another thing all together to just kill off a species.

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  • by Sweet T on March 22nd, 2008

    Sweet T

    That is exactly what it is, a story.

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  • by koldkanuck on March 22nd, 2008

    koldkanuck

    Wether in Canada or the USA a savage is a savage...
    According to recent studies done by the Canadian Veterinary Medical Association (CVMA), the hakapik, when used properly, kills the animal quickly and painlessly. Several American studies carried out from 1969-1972 in the Pribilof Islands of Alaska came to the same conclusion.[48] The Royal Commission on Seals and Sealing in Canada, also known as the Malouf Commission, claims that properly performed clubbing is at least as humane as the methods used in commercial slaughterhouses, and according to the Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO), these studies "have consistently proven that the club or hakapik is an efficient tool designed to kill the animal quickly and humanely."

    A study of the 2001 Canadian seal hunt conducted by five independent veterinarians, commissioned by the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), [49] concluded that, although the hakapik is a humane means of hunting, many hunters were not using it properly. This improper use, they said, was leading to "considerable and unacceptable suffering," and in 17 percent of the cases they observed, there were no detectable lesions of the skull whatsoever. In numerous other cases, the seals had to be struck multiple times before they were considered "unconscious."[50] These findings are at odds with the CVMA report which states that Daoust, at the same time and in the same location, recorded that 86 percent of skulls had been completely crushed by strikes with hakapiks. It states further that two years previously, Bollinger and Campbell had recorded that 98.2 percent of the skulls examined were completely crushed.[51]

    In 2005, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) commissioned the Independent Veterinarians Working Group Report. With reference to video evidence, the report states: "Perception of the seal hunt seems to be based largely on emotion, and on visual images that are often difficult even for experienced observers to interpret with certainty. While a hakapik strike on the skull of a seal appears brutal, it is humane if it achieves rapid, irreversible loss of consciousness leading to death."[52]

    The 2001 report contained a number of recommendations on how sealing could be conducted more humanely. They did not, however, recommend the disuse of the controversial hakapik. Actually, the report recommended more training, mandatory blink-reflex tests for unconsciousness, and the cessation of open-water hunting. The report also recommended that seals be bled out immediately after clubbing, in order to ensure that the animals are unconscious when skinning begins. This is a recommendation taken in response to incidents of seals regaining consciousness after clubbing.[53] It has also been strongly recommended that seals killed by guns to be shot to a quick death, not be wounded and left to die. The 2002 CVMA report, however, indicated an average time of 45.2 seconds between the animal being shot and a sealer killing it with a hakapik. The report concluded that this time compared well with established and acceptable humane killing practices according to the Agreement on International Humane Trapping Standards where acceptable times range from 45-300 seconds.

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  • by koldkanuck on March 22nd, 2008

    koldkanuck

    I'm saying that whitey was not the only source of the bison's demise.
    The Indians contributed greatly.

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  • by technios on June 2nd, 2008

    technios

    i cant pass judgment but did they use clubs or spades?

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  • by koldkanuck on March 22nd, 2008

    koldkanuck

    I think wyoming is in the states,

    The most famous of Wyoming's buffalo jumps is the Vore Buffalo Jump located near Beulah. From the layers of bones, scientists have estimated that some 20,000 bison were killed at the site and that it was in use as late as 1800 A.D. Other buffalo jumps have been located near Sheridan, the Big Goose Jump, used about 1500 A.D.; the Glenrock Jump and one on Steamboat Mountain in the Red Desert.


    The earliest method of killing buffalo was by making camp around the herd, with the tipis pitched close together, side by side; then two young men with waka bows and arrows ran around the entrapped animals, singing medicine-songs to bring them under a spell, so that the people could close in and kill large numbers. Following this primitive method, they slaughtered numberless bison by driving them into a compound -- a stockade-like enclosure, usually of logs, at the foot of some abrupt or sheer depression, its plan of construction depending on the nature of the ground. In a mountainous region, where the buffalo plains might end at a high cliff, no enclosure was needed. The long line of stampeded animals would flow over the precipice like a stream of water, to be crushed to death in their fall. There was no possibility of drawing back at the brink; the solid mass was irresitibly forced on by its own momentum, and the slaughter ended only with the passing of the last animal that had been decoyed or driven into the stampede. At other times the embankment over which the buffalo ran was only high enough to form one side of the enclosure. In rare instances pens were built on the open prairie, and at one side of the stockade was thrown up an inclined approach along with the buffalo were driven to fall at its end into the corral.
    The manner of driving and decoying the bison was a varied as the form of the slaughter-pen; but whatever the method, the purpose and results were the same -- the object was to stampede the herd, or a part of it, and to direct the rapidly moving animals to a given point, the Indians knowing that, once well in motion, they would run into their own destruction. The Sioux built out in rapidly diverging lines from the pen a light brush construction, not in truth a fence, as it was only substantial enough to form a line. Men concealed themselves behind this brush, and when the herd was well inside the lines the hunters rose up and by shouting and waving their blankets frightened the animals on. Sometimes a man skilful in the ways of the bison would disguise himself in one of their skins and act as leader of the drove to the extent of starting them in their mad rush. By this method the Indians simply took advantage of a characteristic habit of the buffalo -- to follow their leader blindly. The movement grew into a stampede, and forced the leading animals before it. If the advance was toward a sharp gully, it was soon filled with carcasses over which the stream of animals passed; if toward swampy land or a river with quicksand bed, numbers were swalllowed in the treacherous depths. If it happened that the route took the herd across a frozen lake or stream, the ice might collapse with their combined weight and drown hundreds; and the Indians relate many instances in which during winter the herd failed to see the edge of an arroyo or a small cañon filled with drifted snow and were buried one after another in its depths, the buffalo seemingly not having sufficient instinct of self-preservation to stop or turn aside.

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