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Byron Edgington

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Blogs by Byron Edgington

dead monk seals in Hawaii
5/13/2013 9:04:05 AM

who is killing the Hawaiian monk seals?
The feature story in Sunday's New York Times Magazine was about the mysterious killing of monk seals in Hawaii. The seals are on the federal endangered species list, but in the past year or so four of them have been slain, two on Molokai, two on Kauai. Here's my take on why this seal-icide is happening.
My wife and I lived on Kauai for almost three years. It was not unusual to visit a beach, especially a south shore beach, and find the standard yellow police tape cordoning off a section of sand, monk seal sound asleep within its perimeter. Not unusual, either, to see a gaggle of tourists snooping around the yellow tape, like nosy Parkers at a crime scene, snapping pictures that would be used to cure a neighbor's insomnia back home in Tulsa, or Toledo, or Trenton. The seals don't do much. Like cats, or newborn humans actually, they sleep mostly, occasionally snort to indicate you're getting too damn close and back off, or once in a great while raise a whiskered snout and have a look see, as if posing for folks in Tulsa or Toledo. Then why are monk seals being killed?
I believe it's because the local people feel threatened. Let me explain. Hawaiian people don't like us Haoles very much. (That's How-Lees for the puzzled among you, and it means foreigner). Hawaiians have a darn good reason to dislike the haoles, too, as they have been treated rather harshly by them for a few hundred years. It's the typical invader pressuring the locals off their sacred land scenario, and Hawaiians have a lot of resentment about it. I detail this tension between Hawaiians and the haoles in my book if you'd like more detail. (New feature: a Free Download--check it out).

But why kill monk seals? The poor seals were there first, but no matter. They, too, have begun taking over, this time local fishing grounds, and their behavior is seen as matching the haole's'. Then along comes the Federal government and protects the seals. Since there were no equivalent legal measures to protect Hawaiians when they were endangered, they quite naturally wonder what's going on? I guess I would, too.
It's quite sad, because the Hawaiian people I knew were, if anything, overly protective of their wildlife and cultural artifacts. Killing seals, or anything else for that matter, is not something they'd ordinarily do. Many times on Kauai, long about three a.m., I wished they'd be willing to kill a few roosters, but that's another story. There are many sides to this issue, not least of which is a gap between cultural values relating to education, religion, tourism and even capitalism itself and the use of the sacred Aina for profit. I'm afraid the monk seals are literally caught in the crosshairs of Hawaiians' frustration with the latest incursion on their lives, and are paying for it with theirs.

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