February is upon us, and the annual anti-seal hunt emails have begun. Every year, we get thousands of them.
And every year, in an age of electronic rubber-stamping, the actual number of individual letters gets smaller and smaller.
That seems counter-intuitive — tonnes of emails, but fewer and fewer individual contacts.
But it’s true — and you can blame the Internet for making the letters easier to send, and dramatically easier to compose.
Why?
Because they’re not really someone’s letter at all — they’re as much spam as the latest email telling you your help is needed laundering millions of dollars of stolen Nigerian weapons payments.
Let’s dissect the anti-sealing letter we received from Dr. Luigi Erba in Monza, Italy, on Monday.
It contains the sentence, “Instead of investing in meaningful employment opportunities for Newfoundlanders, the federal government continues to fund and support a seasonal and wasteful seal hunt which draws national and international criticism to a proud region of Canada trying to build a reputation for high-tech research and first-class environmental tourism.”
Run that sentence through Google, and you find its source in seconds: it’s a sample letter suggested in an online petition from Change.org.
There were 584 signatures on the anti-sealing petition Monday morning — the organizers were looking for 1,000.
Change.org is a veritable clearinghouse of petitions: you can find a place there to urge the city of Nashville to “expand anti-discrimination law to contractors and vendors” (1,045 signatures) or to force eBay to stop selling live animals (9,003 signatures). You can ask the Publix grocery store chain to sell “slave-free tomatoes” (6,193 signatures) or try to force Congress to stop buying bottled water (50,717 signatures).
It’s an impressive warehouse of dissent, and one that regularly wins victories for its petitioners.
But in some ways, it’s a victim of its own ease.
Yes, you can go online and quickly register your disapproval on hundreds of petitions — 13 of them on the Canadian seal hunt alone, including one seeking a maple syrup boycott — but when decision-makers look at those petitions and their accompanying letters and emails, those same decision-makers weigh the ease with which instant dissent can be offered, and come to the easy decision to ignore it.
Your three seconds of cut-and-paste effort will get, if you’re lucky, three whole seconds of consideration.
How do you take someone’s missive as a honest expression of their concerns when all they’re doing is adding their name to the foot of someone else’s letter, cut and pasted into place and sent to the same fleet of email addresses?
In the coming weeks, we’ll receive the same e-mailed letters from Italy and Germany, from France and the United States and Great Britain.
Many will be caught in automatic spam filters and simply be discarded, unread.
Perhaps it’s the treatment they deserve. It’s hard to argue that you’re trying to have an honest discussion about a serious issue when you can’t even be bothered to put it in your own words.
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Paul, I suggest you know your topic before going off the deep end. All it takes is a google search and some cross referencing between sites. http://www.mypointis.net/facts.html http://www.ypte.org.uk/animal/seal-harp-/168 There, that took me all of two minutes to find, read and copy here. Now you know how wrong you are regarding the Harp Seal life cycle and why there is a hunt, perhaps you'll actually know your subject before making the mistake of commenting again? Just sayin'...