President Donald Trump has coveted Greenland since his first term — and according to a new report, he is considering using animal cruelty in order to achieve his goals.
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“One American businessman has spotted a potential commercial opening [with Greenland]: sealskins,” reported The Wall Street Journal’s Sune Engel Rasmussen on Monday. “Investor Larry Swets said he last month delivered a 36-page proposal to the White House, through Landry, calling on the president to lift the U.S. ban on seal products as a way to improve relations with Greenlanders, through what he calls sealskin diplomacy.”
Rasmussen continued, “Greenlanders and other Inuit peoples have hunted seals for their meat and skin for centuries, but international bans have collapsed sealskin markets. Swets’s proposal, which The Wall Street Journal has seen, seeks to generate income for some of Greenland’s remote communities and to serve as a ‘confidence-building measure.'”
Rasmussen added that Swets says the genesis of his sealskin idea occurred after Greenlanders kept bringing up the ban during a business conference in Nuuk.
“Restoring access to the U.S. market would support Greenlandic hunters and communities, while also sending a powerful signal that America respects Greenlanders’ culture, livelihoods and right to make these choices for themselves,” Swets told Rasmussen.
Rasmussen added, “Greenland has repeatedly asked the EU to lift its ban on seal products, in effect since 2009, saying it harms indigenous people in the Arctic.”
Describing its opposition to seal hunting, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) describes the torturous methods used to slaughter the pinnipeds.
“Sealers use a variety of weapons, including clubs, ‘hakapiks’ (heavy wooden clubs topped by a barbed metal hammer head), and rifles,” PETA wrote. “Sealers often hook baby seals in the eye, cheek, or mouth to avoid damaging their fur, then drag them across the ice to skin them.”
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PETA also cited a University of Bristol study from 2007 which found that Newfoundland sealers engaged in “widespread disregard for the requirements of Canada’s marine mammal regulations” including not checking whether an animal was still alive before beginning to skin it. Many of them showed “some response to stimuli after being hooked and dragged,” with a majority not dying after being struck with the first bullet.
Speaking with this journalist for Salon in 2020, PETA co-founder and president Ingrid Newkirk explained why their organization advocates for treating animals with compassion.
“Of course we are one animal among many, and all the animals experience all the emotions,” Newkirk said. “They are great emotional beings. They’re not robots or tables or chairs.”
In the same Wall Street Journal article, Rasmussen observed that Greenland’s economy has benefited from Trump’s pressure by using it to convince the European Union to increase its investments. More broadly, the European Union’s and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)’s countries have stood by Greenland in the face of Trump’s threats to annex the island, which is owned by Denmark.
“We are ready to defend every inch of NATO, including our own territory,” Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen told the press at a July NATO summit. “One of the reasons why we built NATO many, many years ago is if anything happens to one of us then everybody should stand up for each other.”
Similarly, Icelandic premier Kristrún Frostadóttir told reporters that “the lines in the sand are clear: Greenland belongs to the people of Greenland.”
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