Your eloquence and enthusiasm is well noted. however any species that is plentiful enough to be classified as pests in some places ought to be utilized as a natural, organic, and sustainable product, to be used in place of nylon that is so commonly worn by members of the protest industry. By your definition, natural plentiful, and historically green products worn by thousands of generations of humans, make native and non native people truly evil.

Luckily, Derek, the EU is not a total no-go zone for seal products. Importing them on a commercial basis is banned, but you can still visit Canada or anywhere else that sealskin is used for clothing, and bring them back as personal effects. It will be interesting to see if the UK carries on with the ban once it leaves the EU.

You dismissively cite lobbying efforts by animal rights’ activist as if that’s the end of the story, but the momentum behind such groups is fuelled by our history of driving MULTIPLE species to extinction, often through careless overhunting – very often these are species that were extremely abundant at first. Read up on the passenger pigeon, which went extinct as a result of mass hunts meeting its unique population dynamics (basically, it needed large flocks for its life strategy to work). Thylacines, which occupy a similar niche among marsupials as wolves and foxes, used to be prevalent too before they were hunted to extinction. Some species have external factors threatening them even if their numbers are okay, like habitat fragmentation, or climate change (and the latter affects seals, as they’re cold-dwelling marine mammals that are very much dependent on the dynamic of ice coverage in their habitat, and thus on temperature). Finally, even if they’re listed as Least Concern, the fact is that we have no current population trend data for some of these species, so while we expect that there are a lot of them, we don’t know how it’s been developing. This species is abundant, but some drastic shift in its environment (like the marine ecosystem, which seals rely on for food, tipping out of balance due to pollution or climate change or overfishing or what have you) could have its numbers drop drastically within half a decade, and it’s nonsensical to inflict hunting and trapping as yet another source of risk.

Even if all of the above were not a problem, it’s not just about the numbers of the target species, per se. Unless it’s possible to create fur/skin farms for the animal, any hunting or trapping of it in the wild on the scale necessary to satisfy worldwide demand is severely, catastrophically detrimental to the habitat and all the species living there. Sometimes conservation of one species (like the seal) is more about protecting other species by proxy, especially when said seal species is cute, adorable, and easy to win public support for (these two effects, often overlapping, are called “umbrella species” and “flagship species”). A cute species of desert fox may be less in need of protection than some Critically Endangered ten species of lizards or termites endemic to the same area, but by virtue of how our brains are wired, it’s easier to motivate us to protect the little fox than a bunch of lizards. And of course, it’s all tied together. Other species rely on seals for their food, such as predators higher up the food chain, and they may require a specific minimal population DENSITY for the seals to be able to do that effectively. Start hunting seals, and you may endanger polar bears far sooner than you would endanger harp and ringed seals. And at the end of the day, as much as we may know about ecosystems and food chains, we’re still dealing with a chaotic system that we can only predict up to a certain degree.

Conservation is complicated, and the simple fact of it is that harvesting seal skins or the like is a luxury, and it’s not important enough to warrant all the risks of something going wrong and dealing yet more damage to the environment. We’ve already made those mistakes many times, and at this point, with so many human-caused factors driving species to extinction that we CAN’T effectively do anything about, it’s better safe than sorry.