We dive, seals dive.
I also live in Perth and saw those pictures and read the article. I've also been reading 'A Year of Slow Food' and so to read these comments on seals and the sheep trade a few things come to mind:
1. The paper here is seen by many as terrible: right wing, lazy and imbalanced. Most stories are on crime because you just get a cadet to listen to the police scanner and a few people to put pages either side of that ... so why was this picture, in colour on the front page?
2. Apart from 1 above, there's quite a lot of misinformation in this post and it's angled to exclude participants who may not wish to see the continuation of seal culls.
3. Death and killing as part of an export system. I had a friend who harvested pearls (in a commercial oyster farm) and it was probably one of the most gruesome jobs I've heard of, the oysters are brought out of the water and left to break-down in 30 degree (Celsius) heat. While the oysters are rank, they are opened and the pearl extracted. So when I think of pearls, I think of the finished product containing this aspect as part of its life. No one could love an oyster (as they may a dog, cat ...) but it does sort of show a distancing. Why they harvest like that, I don't know, maybe it's the easiest way to extract the pearl. Most of you probably kill fish you know how to do it but it's not particularly cool to say I know how to kill cattle, how to make the cuts, how to use the whole cow. Most of us are distanced from that but different animals respond differently in the face of death (there's a great book on wolves, where the author talks about occasions when wolves will stare at an animal (after trapping/exhausting it, some are killed, others are left)) and being distanced from animals we tend not to know those differences.
4. It's difficult to comment on the killing of seals from here but seals have told us a lot about free diving.
5. Sentimentality can be the start of a journey to celebrate the environment but generally there's better times for many animals in preserving habitat. Many people feel totally powerless when reading about seal clubbing because they don't move in circles who hunt seals, nor do they move in circles who buy seal fur. So it is a kind of spectacle. Much like this thread.