Sea of Slaughter
O'Brien, Tom
Chronicle of extinction SEA 0F SLAUGHTER Farley Mowat Atlantic Monthly Press, $24.95, 438 pp. Tom O'Brien ANIMALS have always become extinct: only now they do so more rapidly. Such is the...
...As Mowat points out, humans have lived with a large variety of species for millennia, and so-called primitives have done so fairly harmoniously...
...A postscript: Mowat recently gained more notoriety when he was denied entrance into the United States to promote this book on the grounds, said a humorless State Department official, that he associated with Communists and anarchists and made threats against the American military...
...Nevertheless, he spices his massive history of "biocide" with plenty of personal touches that enliven his scholarship and make it readable...
...Such is the blunt thesis of Farley Mowat's Sea of Slaughter, a study of the man-made extinction of fish, bird, and mammal species in the northwest North Atlantic, once one of the richest zoological paradises on earth...
...In previous books this is expressed in dramatic accounts of close encounters between himself and a single species...
...The three dangers are not just posed by humans, in his view, but to humans as well...
...to him, the extinct North American penguin is the "spearbill" (from the Basque "arponaz...
...The threat, as Mowat shows, is complicated...
...But the core of his protest has less to do with use of animals than excess...
...the weight in the progression of chapters starts to build through the book like a dirge...
...His later research and filed work for the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) to save the harp seal also provides relief from the dark numbers of deaths he documents...
...in a later essay on the sea otter Mowat recounts the playfulness of an otter now living near his Cape Breton home...
...But Mowat's ire goes byond the issue of extinction...
...In his other works he has been able to take complicated notions from biology and anthropology and domesticate them with a thoroughly involved, but informative style...
...It's one thing to hunt an animal, Mowat claims, but another to exterminate a class of being...
...If the trends of the last five hundred years continue, however, it will take a second creation to bring them back into being...
...Sea of Slaughter provides some Commonweal: 476 heavier reading...
...His first youthful adventures with polar bears provide an apt prelude for his chapter on the animal...
...their cause is nature...
...The cause has no more eloquent spokesperson...
...Although somewhat unknown here — except as a 6 September 1985: 475 biologist whose real life adventure was the basis of the movie, Never Cry Wolf — Mowat is one of the most widely read authors in the world, with translations of almost all his books into Russian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, and other languages of nations sharing an Arctic border...
...In Sea of Slaughter, however, Mowat has a far more complex story to tell...
...But members of Greenpeace recently interfered with a Russian hunt and were arrested off Kamchatka...
...often species are imperiled not by direct killing but by elimination of their prey in the food chain...
...It is difficult to bring personal poetry to such a book, but Mowat manages...
...His case against these diverse evils — extinction, waste, and sadism — is not finally misanthropic, but built on the perception that "life is indivisible...
...Here he expands beyond his usual animal subjects, wolves and whales, to document a more general' 'biocide'': the regional extinction or near-extinction of shorebirds, fresh and salt water game fish, and supposed oddities such as the Eastern buffalo and grizzly...
...Mowat is a great popularizer...
...Nevertheless, it may help to focus the burgeoning animal rights movement in this country and abroad...
...Much of his history is filled with eyewitness recitations of slaughter that serves no purpose, not even human greed and certainly not survival...
...He makes clear, especially in his chapter on the harp seal, that this waste is intensified by an additional delight in the killing...
...one telling vignette documents how Mowat and other IFAW workers were forbidden from mercy-killing a harp seal after it had supposedly been clubbed to death and was in the process of being skinned alive...
...In Sea of Slaughter, Mowat writes a sad history of life's disappearance...
...Before the Western invasion of the northwest North Atlantic, for example, none of the numerous species he names were anywhere near disappearance...
...The truth is that they, and Mowat, are activists without a country...
...As for the former, hs toured Russia to write The Siberians, and has friends in Greenpeace, the activist group which often interferes with seal and whale hunts...
...Mowat has a knowing love of animals...
...often many of the dead carcasses of hunted animals are left to rot...
...His is a world of lunar tundra and outcrop rock, gnarled roots, twisted trees, and, underneath the somber appearance, the north's "reckless prodigality with that sacred and precious thing called life...
...He has written almost thirty books, most of them concerned with the people, the geology, the fauna, and flora of northeast North America, especially the Canadian maritime provinces...
...As for the latter, he once jokingly said he'd like to shoot down a SAC bomber (on regular patrol over his house in Ontario) with his .22...
...Each chapter covers the history of one such animal in the region between Labrador and Nantucket — the early astonished sightings of European explorers amazed at the numbers and newness of the creatures, the rapacious early assaults with sophisticated technology, and the first stirrings of environmentalist attempts to check the killing, often not quite in time...
...Mowat also begins most chapters with an idiosyncratic account of the evolution of an animal's name...
...Mowat knows the region and subject well...
...Sea of Slaughter is also spiced with strong personal passion against some humans — indeed, Mowat initially accepts the label of misanthropy...
...He is also concerned about the vastness of the destruction — "a massive diminution of the entire body of animate creation" — even when no species is threatened with extermination as a result...
...the curlew is known by its Eskimo name of "swiftwings...
Vol. 112 • September 1985 • No. 15
