Clubbing seals must be a pretty good joke. Two people now have asked me to bring them back a merry photograph of me standing over a seal wielding a club and a grin.

In a country where we've stopped using blue milk-bottle rings because they occasionally get stuck around the necks of cute little baby birds, maybe most of us take the concept of caring for cute animals for granted. The big-eyed seal pup becomes a comic symbol for the underdog, the poor little hard-done-by guy who we can laugh at because we know we love him and everything will turn out OK. Or maybe I've got it all wrong and the seal is just a safe outlet for our bloodthirsty urges, unleashed under the guise of tongue-in-cheek, like a 21st century version of the racist joke. I dunno.

Perhaps I killed my sense of humour by accidentally reading something in a book:

Devoid of fear because of the absence of a land predator in Antarctica the seals were curious about these new creatures and happily waddled up to them, only to be clubbed or shot. The numbers killed were so great that clubbing was the preferred means of dispatch, the sealers walking along the crowded beaches swinging without pause, stopping only as a result of exhaustion or complete annihilation. The sealers preferentially took breeding females and young males as their skins were of better quality [...] Late in the season, when there were fewer seals and those that were found rapidly fled into the sea, the sealers would often pursue them in boats and shoot them. Dead seals sank quickly, so the success rate in gathering them was unlikely to exceed one in five, while wounded animals might escape only to die later.

The salted skins were packed for transport, though even here the stupidity of the exercise is apparent. It is reported that on one large ship returning to London with 100,000 skins on board, the poorly preserved skins became so overheated during the equatorial part of the voyage that they started to rot. By the time London was reached the whole cargo had degenerated into a stinking heap that had to be dug out of the hold and was fit only for spreading as fertiliser.

After the virtual destruction of the fur seals commercial interests turned to elephant seals ...

[from To The Ends Of The Earth by Richard Sale]

Ironically, the reason the seals were able to rebuild their population was because of an excess of krill for them to feed on, which was a result of the slaughter of the krill-feeding baleen whales by commercial whalers.

Anyway.

The result of my joke-spoiling education on seal-clubbing was that it took me a long time to decide whether to include in yesterday's ANARE Antarctic Field Manual extract, the passage where the best way to kill a penguin or a seal is outlined quite explicitely. Then I read some stuff about some early Antarctic expeditions where Wilson had to kill his dogs with a scalpel and Mawson had to kill his last dog with a spade, and I decided that the horror was too great. If you expect ever to be starving and stranded in Antarctica and would like to know how best to club a seal, I warmly recommend to you the Antarctica section of the library, appropriately located at the arse-end of the Dewey Decimal System at 998 - only exceeded in geographic and shelving remoteness by 'extraterrestrial worlds' at 999.