Otters holding guns

How quickly people forget the past — and their favourite YouTube videos.
Remember "Otters holding hands," the video that caught the Internet by furry storm in 2007? The otters in the one-minute, 40-second clip drift about their watery pen at the Vancouver Aquarium holding hands until they seemingly doze off and separate, floating on their backs with paws in the air like cute teddy bears praying to the sun.
Once they float near one another again the younger otter grabs the other's paw and, once again, drift together. The video could even seem like a metaphor for a relationship: you're happy, you're together, and then you're apart. But, sometimes, the waves push you just close enough that you can forgive and rejoin — and all the world's right again.
Weird metaphors aside, no matter how you related to the video, people fawned over the clip — mainly because of the adorable, floating oversized hamsters.
Meanwhile, just across the Georgia Strait from where that video was taken, a Vancouver Island First Nations group thought the otters in that video looked better as hats.
Members of the Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council have reached a tentative deal with the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans to hunt roughly one per cent of the sea otter population in their territory, reports the CBC, working out to about 20 animals a year.
In the May 20 article "Sea otter hunt planned by Vancouver Island First Nations" posted on the CBC website, Cliff Atleo, president of the Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council, said "For us, it's not about the numbers. It's about reconnecting with the pelts worn by our chiefs, the heads of our governments."
Atleo is also concerned about booming sea otters populations decimating sea urchins and shellfish.
"Right now the sea otters are taking more than they actually need," Atleo is quoted as saying in the story. "There's hundreds of sea otters down here that are multiplying year by year."
What are the otters doing?! Can wild animals really afford to be wasteful?
Can't say I've ever seen a sea otter take a bite of some urchin and throw it back in the water, wasting it so he could go catch and waste more... Well, not that I've seen a lot of them, but still...
How does he know this?
Sea otters were once hunted to extinction in the same area the tribal council is proposing the hunt's resurrection and had to be reintroduced from Alaska. There is something fundamentally wrong with that.
If an animal is listed as "at risk," then it should not be hunted by anyone.
This deal could open a can of endangered worms and have hunters all over the country asking why they, too, can't shoot a mountain caribou or a whooping crane.
If only those otters were holding guns instead of holding hands — then I might be on board with making them into ceremonial hats.

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