Seal

by VirginiaMcKenna (Foreword), Fiona (Author)

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  2000

  $3.25

  Seal is the extraordinary of one women's remarkable relationship with the 'people of the sea'. Few people who have read Gavin Maxwell's Ring of Bright Water can forget the author's anger when human ignorance and stupidity caused the deaths of his beloved otters. The lesson, it seems, has still not been learnt. Representatives of salmon angling, netting and farming organisations recently met in Battleby near Perth to call for the reintroduction of an cull of grey seals. Despite there being no scientific evidence that seals are in any way responsible for the declining salmon numbers, the shooting of seals under what are deemed the correct conditions is still perfectly legal. Seals, the people of the sea, are under attack from both nature, through the distemper virus and from the oldest enemy of them all: man. Now Fiona, who lives in a beautiful corner of the Hebridean Isle of Islay, and who for many years has shared her home with seals, has been forced to sacrifice her unique and intensely personal relationship with these animals to public scrutiny in order to save them from the cruelty of man. By exposing her experiences of caring and rearing young seals to a wider human audience, Fiona hopes she can awaken a deeper communication between man and animal.