I have taken this post down for editing. When I posted it I was expecting to be attacked by a group of people who, I guess, decided not to bother after all (Shrug!) I did find that I was attacked from another direction, so I’m reassessing.
But, now that we’re here, lets look at more problems this story about seals raises. These are problems which I hadn’t even thought about in my first discussions about the story.
I was asked by someone why I had such sympathy for the woman who was attacked. The person suggested that unless I knew this woman personally, it was somehow strange that I would have such sympathy, and take up her cause online so strenuously. I think it’s not really that inexplicable.
The woman who was attacked by the seal is 60 years old. I’m old also, and while I can’t speak for her, I know that when I read about this situation it was the first time I’d ever heard of a marine mammal getting it’s own private beach, and one taken from the public, with signs and tape saying a section of the public beach now belonged to the seal. I even think that the woman has a valid complaint that she paid good money for her condo and she is being denied full use of the beach.
It seems to me that in the past, for most of my life, if a seal was raising a pup on a public beach, well, the city workers or the rangers, or someone would trap and relocate the seal and pup to someplace away from the public. There were areas that were given over to seals and wildlife. They weren’t public beaches. So this is something new for older people. I understand that it might have been something very strange for this woman to figure out. It isn’t the way it was before. And there were changes she couldn’t have expected.
A change she couldn’t have expected is the truly astonishing scenario of wild animals having free rein to attack people at will. In this situation it’s not just that the seal has more rights than the woman does to to lay on the beach, eat, sleep and raise her young, but it it has the right to do what, if done by a human, would be a criminal assault. That usually was handled differently in the past also. A lot of times the animal would be shot because, it was reasoned, the animal that attacked once would attack again. The animal “overcoming its fear of humans” was usually considered a bad sign. Attacking a person? Keeping that from happening was the responsibility of the agency in charge of the animal. What happened to this woman was a dereliction of duty by the city, state, and federal authorities.
There’s an expression called “blowing smoke” and I’m wondering if all the talk about how this woman won’t be fined by the state agency, and that she may not be fined by the federal agency either is smoke blown, calculated to move past the fact that the city, the state, and the federal governments are maintaining a dangerous nuisance. Maybe they are hoping no one will question this arrangement. A primary duty of any government is to protect the citizens. I’ve looked up what a individual person must do to keep a wild animal. It has to be enclosed. You must keep it in place that’s safe for everyone. You can’t have a wolf that eats the letter carrier when it feels like it.
If this woman were my sister I already would have found the correct lawyer, This was a preventable attack, and I think a lawyer would just have to show a judge (who also might have grown with the commonsense idea that humans and wild animals don’t mix) the videos showing the vehemence of the attack and a medical report on the wounds, and rabies testing would be a done deal. The pup might have to be brought up in a zoo or wildlife sanctuary. If that bothers you then maybe we need to get back to the idea that seals are best kept at seal beaches and people are best kept at people beaches.
