Individual,
Population,
Environment
Balancing perspectives of care for
seals and the Wadden Sea
Individual, population, environment
Balancing perspectives of care for seals and the
Wadden Sea
Doortje Hörst 10531238
Supervisor: Oskar Verkaaik Second reader: Kristine Krause 17/6/2019
Research Master Social Sciences Doortje_horst@hotmail.com
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Contents
Illustrations... iii
Acknowledgements ... iv
Introduction ...1
1 Cute and dangerous ... 10
2 Caring for persons ... 22
3 Science, ethics and care ... 36
4 Educating care for the Wadden Sea ... 48
Conclusion ... 60
Bibliography ... 66
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Illustrations
Figure 1 Common seal during transport. Courtesy of Seal Rescue Team. 24
Figure 2 Jip in a phase one area. Courtesy of Emeline. 28
Figure 3 Riley in a phase two area. Courtesy of Anna. 29
Figure 4 Release of (back to front) Monkey, Maarten, Bela Tarr and Lleida. Photo by author. 31
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the many people who accompanied me on this research journey. First of all, I am grateful to the seal center who welcomed me as a researcher and volunteer. Caretakers taught me patiently how to engage with seals in rehabilitation and took their time for interviews in-between their busy schedules. The guides in the visitor center accepted me and my recording device at their presentations with much fun. Fellow volunteers at Campus made my time at the seal center feel like home. Thanks especially to Emeline, who was always ready for interesting discussions, and vet intern Stella for commenting on the final draft. Also, the seals taught me to be attentive to them and let me explore the depth of interspecies relations.
Before I started this research, Annet Pauwelussen inspired me to do research on how people engage with the sea and opened the road to marine and environmental anthropology, which was previously unknown to me. Rob van Ginkel directed me to seals at the Wadden Sea as an interesting case. Working on my proposal and previous to my fieldwork, Filipo Bertoni was a helpful advisor and a welcome expert in more-than-human studies. Thanks also to Irene Stengs for fruitful conversations about cuteness in particular. The International Society for Folklore Studies (SIEF) conference in 2019 helped me greatly to structure my thoughts about methods. The STS reading club at the University of Amsterdam introduced me to most interesting readings in the field, accompanied by intense discussions about these texts. I would like to express many thanks to my supervisor Oskar Verkaaik, who supported me at all times. In thoughtful ways, he pointed me gently to interesting directions and perspectives with helpful feedback. His constant calmness and trust in my research project worked contagious. I greatly appreciate the exchange of drafts with my peers Tsjalline Boorsma and Jim Kroezen, who contributed to this thesis with their generous feedback. Importantly, they, and others who regularly joined us at ‘the sixth floor’, made the writing process a good and fun time together.
My deep gratitude goes to Jerrold Cuperus, who is always by my side for tips, support and feedback, but also to challenge me in discussions with critical questions. Finally, I would like to thank my parents for their endless support and belief in me.
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Introduction
The wind is blowing ridiculously strong, about nine Beaufort, and blows the sand against the car. Sea foam, created by the enormous surf, flies over the beach and past the front window, sometimes sticking for a moment on the wiper. Two caretakers of the seal center and I are looking around intensely to spot the seal that we have been called about. Then we see a man with a big dog, waving at us. He was hiding from the cold wind just behind a sand dune. He is clothed in a long, warm winter coat and wears a scarf and gloves. The dog is leashed and gets up from lying low in the sand to standing quietly next to the man. We stop the car. The man leads us to the seal, who is hidden behind a dune pan, sheltered from the wind. The seal is quite small for being around half a year old, perhaps one meter long. The back is tense and there is blood around the mouth. It is clearly a sick seal. With a plastic box the caretakers approach him. He tries to escape by wobbling away, and bites the box as he gets cornered. Still, the caretakers manage to catch the seal by putting the box over him and sliding the lid underneath, pushing the sand away. Carefully they turn the box around. They lift the lid and take a look in the box. The seal is breathing heavily. “We will take this seal in, thank you for calling and staying with him,” says one of the caretakers to the man. He smiles and waves us goodbye as we turn the car around and head to the seal center.
In the Netherlands, five seal centers exist which are fully supported by private donations. Sealcentre Pieterburen, the seal center where I have done most of my fieldwork, has grown from a tub in the backyard with seals in the care of one woman in 1971 to a full-fledged seal hospital, with their own water filtration system, vets, nurses and volunteers in 2019. Citizens actively support seal rehabilitation also in other practices, as can be seen from picking up a seal. Even in cold, windy weather, someone takes the effort to call a seal center and even stays with the seal until help arrives. Caretakers drive a car on the beach in the storm when the spring tide is at its highest, taking the augmented risk of getting stuck in quicksand.
The seal center was established to care for an endangered common seal population in the Wadden Sea. The seal hunt was prohibited since 1962, but the population still dwindled from around one thousand seals to around five hundred seals in the time the seal center started
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(Brasseur 2018: 6). Since 1991, following massive seal deaths in 1988 because of a virus, the Bonn Convention was made, a trilateral agreement to care for seals by the cooperation between the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark, which all border the Wadden Sea. Now, there is an estimation of 12.000 common seals in the Dutch part of the Wadden Sea, and 5.000 grey seals who settled in the Netherlands only since the 1980s (Brasseur 2018: 6, 8). A new approach to seal rehabilitation is necessary, argue both ecologists and seal centers. The Scientific Advisory Committee (SAC) published a report to advice policy revisions of seal rehabilitation in the Netherlands. The population is near carrying capacity, they argue, which means that the population is at the end of the growing curve, and will become steady from now on (Van der Zande 2018: 6). Reaching carrying capacity implies that seals are in competition for limited resources. Early deaths are unavoidable. Furthermore, for the ecosystem in the Wadden Sea, it is important that the five-kilos-fish-per-day-eating-seals will not grow further, because it would bring the ecosystem out of balance. For the population and the ecosystem, deaths of some individuals would be healthy.
Still, not all deaths are considered a balancing act of nature. When seals are weakened due to human causes, for example when they get stuck in waste floating around in the sea, seals should be rehabilitated. The SAC considers this to be the moral responsibility of humans, who have polluted the seas and brought seals in a dangerous position. Even if death is perceived as a balancing act by some, letting die is seen as an immoral act by others. The Oostvaardersplassen, a protected natural area in the province of Flevoland, is an example of condemning the act of letting big mammals die in the Netherlands. Horses, cows and deer were starving because of food shortages at the end of winter in early 2018. Activists came to feed the grazers, and pushed the government to prevent further deaths in later years. They did so with success. The following year the local government has looked for ways to engage in more responsible ways with the horses, cows and deer. In the seal center, letting die is also contentious. As mentioned, the seal center enjoys support for seal rehabilitation among people in the Netherlands. The facilities are available to care for seals who are suffering. If care is not given to compromised seals it would be a deliberate choice of the seal center, one which very potentially not all sponsors would agree with.
Amidst this ambiguity, the seal center has set its goal to care for seals as individuals and populations, as well as for the environment. The focus of the seal center has gradually shifted to prioritizing care for the population and the environment, in ideals and in communication to the public. In practice however, prioritizing a population is difficult and care for individuals is more prominent. Constant questioning from media, visitors, ecologists,
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nurses and volunteers pressure the seal center to renegotiate and rethink these priorities and care they provide. In this thesis, I show how the seal center cares for seals as individuals and populations and their environment in the Netherlands. In the first chapter, I will show how the seal center has shifted focus from caring for seals as cute individuals in need of saving, to dangerous predators who give the seal center an indication of the health of the environment. At the same time, this ‘shift’ is difficult to establish, as both cute and dangerous co-exist and are in friction during everyday interactions between seals and humans. In the second chapter, care for individuals takes center stage, as identification is enormously important to provide ‘good’ care in the seal hospital. Attachment and detachment are in continuous friction between patients and their caretakers, which is highlighted when focusing on practices of naming. In the third chapter, difficulties of shifting from caring for individuals to caring for populations surface in the practices of care. Informed by science and technologies, caretakers try to develop better ways to diagnose lungworm infection in seals, which might benefit the seal population. Lastly, I discuss how the seal center focuses on care for the environment by educating their visitors, and participants in organized events. The meaning of ‘nature’ shifts with different practices, as do the entanglements between humans, seals and environment.
A multispecies STS framework
This thesis can be situated in a recent abundance of ‘multispecies ethnographies’, as Stefan Helmreich and Eben Kirksey (2010) have called it. Multispecies ethnographies have become a genre that breaks down nature and culture boundaries, by showing how more-than-humans are intricately entangled.1 It is a very diverse genre, as an analytic boundary between nature and
culture is counterproductive in continuously more cases, sites and sciences, such as everyday life of a North American woman, Amazonian indigenous cosmopolitics, and US ocean science (Haraway 2008; De la Cadena 2010; Helmreich 2009). Donna Haraway (1985; 2003; 2008; 2016) has made it an extensive project to break down these boundaries and show the entanglements. To go beyond a nature culture distinction, she proposes the term naturecultures to keep them together by definition (2003: 16). Anna Tsing, following Haraway, beautifully says: “Human nature is an interspecies relationship,” (Tsing 2012: 144, emphasis in original). Other ‘anthropologies’ are also being constructed, such as the ‘anthropology of life’, by Eduardo Kohn (2007), or an ‘anthropology beyond the human’ by
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Tim Ingold (2013). Some critics argue that ‘multispecies’ seems to focus on species primarily, which might give rise to a generalization over species based on a Western scientific taxonomy (Ingold 2013: 19). However, authors of multispecies ethnographies question exactly these taxonomies, and emphasize interspecies interaction beyond human exceptionalism in which species is generally not the unit of analysis (Tsing 2015: 162; Van Dooren et al. 2016: 5).
Some multispecies studies are associated with the ‘ontological turn’ (Kohn 2015). The ontological turn is characterized by a focus on ontological differences, rather than ‘cultural’ differences. Some recognize differences in perceiving nature between ‘western’ and ‘non-western’ ontologies (Descola 2013[2005]; Viveiros de Castro 1998). In these analyses, ‘western’ ontology is one in which nature and culture are rigidly distinct, with multiple cultures and one nature, while ‘non-western’ ontologies have multiple natures (Viveiros de Castro 1998: 478). Critical of this ‘Western backdrop’, Emily Yates-Doerr and Annemarie Mol (2012: 49) call for a more nuanced understanding of what is often considered ‘the West’. They show in their article that ‘nature’ in the form of meat comes into being in different ways in a variety of practices, and is thus not uniform at all. They bring attention to the differences ‘within’, by focusing on how objects and subjects are enacting and enacted in different practices, which reveals different ontologies that go with those practices. With this theoretical approach, ontology becomes not a wide encompassing cosmology with rigid boundaries, but fluid and attuned to small, mundane differences that matter deeply with wide-ranging effects (Mol & Law 2008; Pols 2006).
By focusing on practices such as care, relational ways of living come into focus (Abrahamsson et al. 2015: 13). Who cares for what depends per person and their practices in a network (Law 2010). These different forms of care are not practiced in isolation from each other. They are in relation to one another because they are part of a network. Multiple kinds of ‘care’ therefore co-exist and may be in friction, as some events bring them together. A focus on care brings out tensions and layers, and attunes the researcher to what is at stake in a certain case. Tensions emphasize relationality, which is especially relevant when studying interspecies interaction in nature conservation, where care often becomes a central concept (Bocci 2017; Crowley et al. 2017; Van Dooren 2014; Salazar Parreñas 2018). Caretakers in nature conservation involve themselves with another species and try to understand their ways of life, to protect their existence in the world, which is very much a practice of care. In these studies, caring practices by conservationists are ‘unsettled’, an aspect of care that is especially emphasized by Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholars of care (Murphy 2015; Puig de la Bellacasa 2011). It is not all ‘good’ and ideal. Actually, when caring for a certain
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species, members of other species might be killed (Bocci 2017; Crowley et al. 2017), or members of the same species endure hardships to ensure reproduction (Salazar Parreñas 2018; Van Dooren 2014).
In these conservation studies, there is a widespread focus on extinction, which legitimates and hides unsettling practices of care. A shared priority to care for a population often overrides a focus on care for individuals (Braverman 2015; Van Dooren 2014). These authors bring attention to the non-innocence of care, to encourage their readers to dig deeper and ‘stay with the trouble’ (Haraway 2016). While some conservationists might present certain widely accepted ideals of care as solutions, these authors problematize that notion (Van Dooren 2014).
My thesis will add to this existing body of literature, as it focuses on conservation of a species not on the verge of extinction. To the contrary, seals in the Netherlands are doing really well. Because this is the case, the seal center actively negotiates how to balance care for individuals and populations. I will therefore focus on these active negotiations practiced by the conservation project, by exploring the tensions that come with it. Furthermore, the seal center turns focus to what is often lost in conservation studies: the importance of caring for the environment in which the conservation species reside. Including the environment is important for conservation, because it is part of the cause of species conservation. However, this combination of species and environmental conservation is often not accounted for in social studies on conservation.
Drawing on these theoretical frameworks, this thesis focuses on marine conservation practices in the Dutch Wadden Sea. At the Wadden Sea, polarization between nature and culture have been dominant in policy and management of the area, in which for example fisheries have stood opposite to nature conservationists (Egberts 2019: 67; Walsh 2018; Krauss 2005). All these authors argue that since the denomination of UNESCO World Heritage, these polarizations have worsened as the designation is only for natural heritage, not cultural heritage. Linde Egberts (2019: 68) makes an explicit call for frameworks that analyze cases in the Dutch Wadden Sea in ways that go beyond a nature/culture distinction and focus on interconnections instead. This thesis answers to that question and presents a case through a multispecies framework. Moreover, the focus on practices emphasizes the complexity of these interconnections of nature conservation at the Wadden Sea.
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Methods
This thesis is based on four months of fieldwork, from September to December in 2018, carried out with the aim to understand how the Sealcentre Pieterburen in the Netherlands cares for seals. In this period, I have dived into newspapers since the 1950s to now, explored trilateral, national and local policy and law documents, did participant observation and interviews at two seal centers and kept track of the Facebook page of the seal center. By using all these methods, I have analyzed the seal center from various angles, which were at times complementary, in friction, or used for triangulation.
As care for seals is currently in a period of change in which more attention is directed to the population of seals instead of individuals, I took a historical perspective to understand the current difficult position of the seal center. On Delpher.nl, a Dutch website by the
Koninklijke Biblioteek (Dutch Royal Library), I searched for Dutch national and local news
articles from 1950 to 1995. Newspapers with articles that mentioned the seal center were varied, but the local newspaper Nieuwsblad van het Noorden is overwhelmingly present, as well as the Frisian newspaper Leeuwarder Courant. Other newspapers were De Volkskrant,
NRC, Trouw, De Telegraaf, Het Parool, and Het Vrije Volk (now part of Algemeen Dagblad).
From 1995 to 2018 I used the database LexisNexis and selected Dutch newspapers, where I found articles published in all of the above newspapers, using the same search terms. In these articles, I analyzed how the journalists wrote about the seals and the activities of the seal center, and how it changed over time.
To gain an understanding of how the seal center’s practices are informed by legal frameworks, I have delved into international, national and local policies and guidelines. I analyzed the trilateral agreements, which came into existence in 1991, and all updates every five years until to date. The Dutch Flora en Faunawet (currently the Natuurbeschermingswet) and the Dierenwelzijnswet provide frameworks for rehabilitation. For local policies of the seal center I have gone through all year reports from 2000 to 2016, the latest one available. Additionally, I discussed these findings in two interviews with one of the employees in the management board of the seal center. In this interview, it became clear how the seal center negotiates these policies, but also influences them. In that way, policies are not analyzed as a framework in which the seal center operates, but as a practice the seal center stands in relation to and interacts with.
I have done participant observation in many aspects of the seal center to explore what the seal center entails. I assisted in seal care, was part of the visitor center in communication
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with visitors, went on pick-ups, and accompanied releases. Participant observation is a valuable method to research interspecies interaction and to understand how people relate to their environment. It enables the anthropologist to research feelings and non-verbal communication by gaining embodied knowledge. Embodied knowledge is knowledge that interlocutors and researchers produce or know through their bodies. An anthropologist can gain embodied knowledge particularly by reflecting on the experience of their own participating body in relation to the context of the field (Okely 2007: 69; Olive 2014: 502). With participant observation, I was able to experience non-verbal communication by practical learning, in which I gained feedback from caretakers who trained me, as well as from seals. With my complete inexperience in caretaking, even the common sense of caretaking surfaced explicitly in my training, which gradually changed as I got more experience. Participation also helped me to make sense of atmospheres, as I was part of the embodied interaction between caretaker and seal that is informed by and produces abstract feelings (Bille 2015). This was important, as feelings often remained abstract when caretakers talked about those in interviews, while for me they were extremely present in direct interaction with seals and the environment.
Still, I was confronted with at least two common challenges of participant observation: the balance between participation and observation, and the highly personal experience gained by doing research. I worked with the first challenge by using a GoPro camera to film caretaking practices. This allowed me to go into the seal area as a third person without caretaking tasks to observe interaction between experienced caretakers and seals. Film makes it possible to revisit the caretaking moment and to press stop and play at every moment I wish. This is especially valuable, as non-verbal communication between experienced caretaker and seal is quite standardized by routine, and differences are in the details. I responded to the second challenge by blogging for the seal center, which were posted on the seal center’s website and Facebook. Blogging gives the possibility to share personal reflections with a wide range of interested persons (Olive 2012). While reactions on the posts were scarce, during my stay several staff members mentioned my blogs and related to them, often in positive ways. When they mentioned they recognized similar feelings or passions, I understood these as more than personal and shared within the context of the seal center.
I complemented observations with interviews with experienced caretaking staff, veterinarians and researchers who I could not accompany with participant observation, previous adopters and people who have found a seal. As the volunteer group and staff are international, several interviews were done in English, which was not the native language of
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either of us. Therefore, I do not focus in detail on specific words used by my participants. I translated quotes from Dutch to English when I used them in my chapters. The original Dutch version can be found in appendix A. During interviews with the nurses, I was able to relate my own experiences to those of the experienced caretakers, which made their experiences and perspectives imaginable and understandable for me. My observations of the caretakers gained more depth by talking with them about their seal care practices and led to interesting triangulation of my observations. People who had found the seals that were brought to the center were difficult to reach. I therefore posted a call on the Facebook page of the seal center, and I have sent a personal message to those who responded to the post. The interviews were done over the phone and aimed to recreate their stories of finding a seal, following their engagement with the seal until after the release.
Finally, I spent ten days at another seal center to create distance from my findings in Sealcentre Pieterburen, to see in which ways Sealcentre Pieterburen is particular, and how that influences the way they care for seals. I went back to the seal center for another week to discuss these insights with them. Observations this week in seal care were informed by the other seal center and led to new insights. It is important to emphasize that this thesis is not a report on seal rehabilitation in the Netherlands, but specifically focuses on how the Sealcentre Pieterburen cares for seals and the sea in the Netherlands.
Ethics
When doing participant observation and interviews, I have stayed for two months at the Sealcentre Pieterburen. The seal center is an internationally well-known seal rehabilitation center situated in the north of the Netherlands. They provide spots for volunteers from many countries to assist in seal care, do internships, or participate as research assistants. As such, my presence as a researcher for my Master studies was quite common, although I was the only one who studied from a Social Science perspective. This was nevertheless broadly supported, by volunteers as well as staff, and led to many curious questions about my thoughts and continuous writing. The minimum stay was eight weeks, during which the volunteers (including me) stayed on ‘Campus’, a house with living space for sixteen volunteers, that was situated on the terrain of the seal center. Every two weeks a new ‘batch’ of volunteers came in and others went away. I always introduced myself as a researcher who also took into account what was being said and done in Campus if relevant, and I promised to ask them permission before I would publish anything about them. I wrote a lot of my
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fieldnotes in the common room of Campus, which made me visible as a researcher. As we all knew each other well, this never resulted in an awkward situation, but did lead to jokes about what stories I was writing. Many times, this visibility was an advantage, as fellow volunteers pointed me towards events or persons I would possibly find interesting.
In the visitor center I have not told every visitor about my research as I was answering their questions. When I recorded behind the scene tours, I told about my research and the recording. The visitors all agreed and remain anonymous during this thesis. During feeding presentations I did not open up about the recording, but this was also difficult to do as the visitors often came and went during the presentation. In all cases, the visitors remain anonymous in this thesis. This anonymity is quite assured as visitors tended to ask the same questions, which makes them unrecognizable as particular persons.
The seal center is mentioned by name in accordance with the seal center. Nurses and volunteers are also recognizable among the staff and volunteers, and potentially retraceable by others as I use their first names. Although many of them already left the seal center, I have sent all written pieces to the persons featuring in this thesis, and only used those to which they gave their permission. Still, the characters in this thesis, although based on people working in the center, are fully a product of my interpretations and reflection and on how I have come to know these people. It therefore does not account for the persons they are.
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1
Cute and dangerous
“Seals may seem cute, but they actually are not,” says Carla in the visitor center to an audience of around thirty people. We are standing in front of the windows. Above these a sign reads “Intensive Care”. On the other side are two small, sick seals and two caretakers who are there to feed them. Carla goes on: “Seals bite very hard, they have strong teeth. At their current age, they will bite to the bone. When they are a bit older, they are able to bite off your finger.” A caretaker on the other side takes a bowl filled with fish. The seal who was lying lazily in a corner now slides into the water. The visitors utter a high pitched “Awww”.
The seal center counters the image of cuteness that surrounds seals. Seals only ‘seem’ cute. Instead the guide communicates an image of seals as dangerous. The tension between the two is clear. Even though Carla tries to counter the image of cuteness, this is still pervasive as the visitors utter their high pitched ‘aw’. When I ask one of the guides about this ‘fight against cuteness’, as I had come to call it, he says that visitors often come to the seal center with a cute image of seals in mind. The visitor center educates their audience from a didactic rule that people only remember one message from all information they get somewhere. By emphasizing the dangerous image of seals, the seal center tries to convince the visitors that seals are not just cute, they are also very dangerous. But there is more to this than a didactic strategy. The seal population has grown, as has human pressure on the Dutch coast. Respectful and safe ways of engaging with seals and the environment need to be taught and emphasized for frequent encounters.
In this chapter I will explore tensions between cute and dangerous by asking: how do ‘cute’ and ‘dangerous’ become shifting, and co-existing tropes connected to the political agendas of the seal center? First, I will focus on the context in which the seal center came into being and how it developed. From the start, there was a dominant focus on seals as cute, innocent and helpless which supported a focus on animal welfare. Secondly, this shifted to a focus on seals as dangerous predator and bio-indicator. The seal stands as a symbol for the health of the environment, and informs acceptable interspecies interactions in the Netherlands. This perspective encourages a focus on the population and the environment. Thirdly, I will show that in the seal center, seals can be both cute and dangerous depending on the situation
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and specific interactions that occur between seals and caretakers or visitors. By being both cute and dangerous, seals are actors who bring both political agendas of individual animal welfare and a focus on population and the environment together in the seal center.
Cuteness, innocence and dependence
The image of the cute seal became especially prominent in the international movement against the seal hunt. In this movement, especially in the 1960s and 1970s, images of white cuddly pups were depicted on posters, in magazines and spread as cuddly animals (Dauvergne and Neville 2011: 197). Green Peace activists went to Canada and painted seal pups’ white fur green so the fur lost its value for production (ibid.: 198). Brigitte Bardot, a famous actress, also went to the contested site in Canada to take pictures with white harp seals (ibid.). The picture was published on the cover of the journal Paris-Match in 1977. It shows her with her arm around a white seal pup, looking seriously into the camera.2 The title of the article is very
telling as well, translating to: “The crusade of Brigitte Bardot for the baby seals”. Brian Davies, active against the seal hunt throughout his life starting around the 1960s, has a picture on his website on which his nose touches the nose of a white harp seal pup.3 In the 1960s, seal
pups came to be called ‘babies’ such as in the title of the Brigitte Bardot article, and were depicted as harmless and cuddly.
This anti-seal-hunt activism had its impact in the Netherlands as well. The seal hunt in the Netherlands was prohibited in 1962 due to low seal population numbers, so Dutch activism addressed the seal hunts that were still going on in other countries, from whom the Netherlands imported fur. Mary Servaes-Bae (1919-1998), an iconic Dutch folk singer better known under her stage name Zangeres Zonder Naam, issued a protest song against the seal hunt (Omroep West, November 28th 2018).4 The song became popular in 1971 (Van der Meer
& Verwaaij 2018). In the chorus she sings:
Zeehondenbaby’s kijken ons aan Sealbabies look at us
Met ogen die vragen ‘wat heb ik misdaan?’ With eyes that ask ‘What did I do wrong?’
Zeehondenbaby's onschuldig en klein Sealbabies innocent and small
Smeken de mensheid barmhartig te zijn Plead humanity to be merciful
(Vanhalteren 2012).
2 Paris Match n° 1453 du 01 Avril 1977 – “La croisade de Brigitte Bardot pour les bébés phoques”. 3 See https://networkforanimals.org/campaigns/seal-hunt/ (last accessed 12/3/2019).
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The chorus is full of words that emphasize the seals’ cuteness, drawing on the same characteristics as the international anti-seal-hunt movement. Seals are babies with pleading eyes, innocent and small. They are anthropomorphized by the term babies instead of pups, and they are imagined to be asking and pleading. They depend on humanity to come to terms with them, as the seals are at their ‘mercy’. In the verses she contrasts this cuteness with the horrors of blood and death at the time of the seal hunt. Cuteness becomes evident and important, and draws attention to the necessary protection of innocent seals.
The focus on young ones as innocent and dependent has familiar connotations with humanitarianism. Liisa Malkki (2015: 86) argues that humanitarian organizations tend to focus on children, whom they make appear as innocent beings who suffer from the consequences of war spurred by adults. Their innocence and suffering is a sharp contrast by which organizations convince people of a dire situation so they send money (ibid.: 87). As a consequence, the framing deprives children from taking a political stance, because they become powerless and dependent. Children (and seal pups) become apolitical, universal examples to affect others. Cuteness strengthens this further. Cuteness is at the core of asymmetrical power relations, in which the ‘cute’ subject is ‘smaller’ (figuratively and/or literally) and in need of protection of the one who judges the subject as ‘cute’ (Ngai 2012: 11). At the same time, the cute subject makes a demand for care on the judger. The international and national anti-seal-hunt activists present seal ‘babies’ as such innocent, helpless, dependent, ahistorical, apolitical, powerless subjects who call upon the care of a universal ‘humanity’.
Local newspapers report through a similar framework about seal center activities in the Netherlands, further strengthening the image of cuteness. In 1952, the first seal center is established at Texel. There Mr. and Mrs. De Haan start to care for seals, exploring ways to rehabilitate them. The common seal population had become endangered in the Netherlands due to the seal hunt that was gradually restricted and finally abandoned in 1962, with only around 500 seals left in the Dutch Wadden Sea around this time. This gave rise to initiatives to rehabilitate lost seal pups that were found on the beach and release them into the sea after they regained strength. In 1961, the Leeuwarder Courant reports how a seal is rescued by a tourist and later brought to Mr. and Mrs. De Haan:
A little seal of hardly five days old was found yesterday on the beach of Ameland by the Leeuwarder tourist H. Ras, who cared for the helpless small animal but still decided,
13 one resolutely returned and looked between all those people to faultlessly find his new friend. He refused separation (Leeuwarder Courant 21/6/1961: 11).5
Similar words as in the song are present here. The seal is described as small in multiple ways, by calling him a ‘little seal’, ‘small animal’ and ‘small one’. ‘He’ is called a ‘baby’ who is ‘helpless’ and who longs for protection of a human friend. The seal is thereby anthropomorphized, as he makes friends and refuses separation. He becomes a small, helpless baby person dependent on, even demanding, human care for survival. This encourages taking care of seals by intervening in their lives. Continuing in the 1980s, Nieuwsblad van het
Noorden reports on the 12th of July 1984 about a pick-up of a seal from the Wadden Sea, who
is brought to the seal center in Pieterburen. When the seal is picked up they write: “The small seal is alive. He hangs on to his savior and makes the typical seal howl,” (Smit 1984: 7).6 The
seal is small and dependent, as he clings to his ‘savior’. Different from the use of universal, abstracted seals in anti-seal-hunt activism, internationally and nationally, the news articles are reports of specific seals and specific saviors. Still those specific seals become examples of a universal help that all seals in the Netherlands need.
In the 1970s and 1980s, the seal centers do not only focus on rescuing individual seals. They also bring attention to the situation of the Wadden Sea, which is polluted with industrial, toxic chemicals. In the same report of Nieuwsblad van het Noorden, Smit writes: “Ironically enough it must be humans who save the little seals from a sure death. The same humanity who releases PCB’s and similar rubbish in the water. … Consequence: less seal babies who are in turn weaker. So weak that it is more likely that they will lose their mother and need to be rescued by humans,” (Smit 1984: 7).7 This makes clear that ‘humanity’ needs to make up
for pollution, which brings innocent seals in danger.
In 1988, when the seal population had just risen to a 1000, a virus brought down half of the population. Looking back in the 2000s, ecologists Peter Reijnders and Sophie Brasseur (2002: 9) noticed an exponential growth since 1988, and hypothesize that the weakest seals, who were most infected with chemical pollutants, had died. With sharper regulations on water use by the industry, the water got cleaner and seals flourished again. The ecologists argue that the population, estimated 4900 in the 2000s, has gotten healthier. In conclusion, the report states that rehabilitation is not necessary for the health of this vibrant population (Haydar 2002: 127). Still, in the yearly report of 2002-2003 (p.15, 25) of the seal center, the
5 For translation see Appendix A. 6 For translation see Appendix A. 7 For translation see Appendix A.
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consequence of the virus that reoccurred in 2002 was described in terms of an ‘awful’ period of ‘slaughter’. In numerous reports throughout the 2000s, the seal center refers to young seals as seal babies, and emphasizes humans as the enemy who hurt seals by the use of fishing nets, and because of disturbances. Despite the lost support of ecologists, the seal center kept drawing on the image of innocent cute seals who were compromised by human causes. The image of cuteness directs care for seals. The seal center thrived on donations, and grew from a tub in the backyard to an internationally recognized seal center already in the 1990s. The framing strategy contributed to legitimating care for seals in the Netherlands. The focus on cuteness turned attention to the suffering of individual seals building on a political agenda of animal welfare, close to that of anti-seal-hunt activists.
Danger, distance and respect
The focus on cuteness has its limits. The cute image has led to careless engagement with seals in some instances. The seal center buzzes with these stories.
At [one] moment, two animals are dying at the beach and we continuously hear about people who are petting those seals. That is a real risk. A couple of years ago, we even had a dying grey seal and someone put a kid on it to take a picture. If the seal in a last blast of energy would have taken that kid, the kid would have been done for.8
One time, there was a grey seal mother with her pup. It was already fenced off with red-white tape, because it was on a public beach and a lot of people came to take a look. One woman thought: ‘I will just take a picture, but from up close.’ So, she steps over the tape and takes a picture very close to the seal with a big flash. This scared the mother, who turned around as fast as she could and bit the woman in the calf. The woman had to get around six stitches in her leg.9
Anthropologist Liana Chua calls the urge for petting and stroking of cute more-than-humans, in her case orangutans, the “dark side of cuteness” (2018: 889). Rehabilitation centers draw on cuteness to attract attention to conservation, but they also want to protect a species from harm, which often includes closeness to humans who want to touch them for any reason. Using cuteness to attract attention carries risks, as it increases the urge to touch. This goes against the no-contact policy that many conservationists follow (Chua 2018: 890); including
8 For translation see Appendix A. 9 For translation see Appendix A.
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the seal center. Drawing on an image of cute seals might bring money, but it potentially encourages a proximity to seals that is unwanted by the center. Proximity poses risks to the health of seals and humans during interspecies encounters.
The seal center wants to focus on seals as dangerous, to increase the chance that people will remain at a distance from seals and prevent them to wander into the ‘dark side of cuteness’. One strategy is to explicitly emphasize how dangerous seals really are. One day in the visitor center, Carla organizes a ‘kindershow’ for children between five and twelve years old. During this show, Carla invites kids to the podium to help her perform the steps of an intake. This time, the crowd exists of around ten children and their accompanying adults. When Carla starts the intake, she asks the help of one of the kids to see where the seal is. The seal is in a basket that is used to bring seals in. The kid opens the basket with excitement, quickly opens the lid, and then slowly closes the lid. He looks at Carla with disappointment.
C: And is the seal in there?
Kid [low pitched tone]: Yes, but it is a stuffed animal.
C: That sounds a bit disappointed. This is not a real seal, and I will explain why. You can sit down now. You have all seen the seals in there [the intensive care where the sickest seals are kept and cared for], and they all look very cute, but they actually are not so very cute. I will show you with the skeleton.
Carla lowers a skeleton that hangs close to the ceiling with a push on a button, until it is right before the eyes of the crowd.
C: This skeleton is of an adult grey seal. That is the biggest seal we have here in the
Netherlands. They can grow up to three meters in length. And they have something dangerous. Do you already see something that makes you think: ‘I want to keep my distance from that’? Kid: The nails.
C: Yes, the nails. Look at those nails. They are very long. Maybe we would like to put some nail polish on them, but seals don’t do that. They fight with them. Especially if they don’t like each other so much, they just give one another a stomp with their nails. Yes, they are not that sweet. What else would be dangerous?
Kid: The teeth.
C: Yes, the teeth. Seals have very sharp teeth. Actually, the teeth are not that sharp, but they have enormous muscle power, and they can bite very hard. The little seals who are here now
16 can already bite very hard. If they bite, they will bite to the bone. But if they are one year old, they will bite your finger off. They look very cute, but they are not. And that is why I did not bring a real seal, because I would like everyone to go home with all their fingers attached.10
Carla pushes the button and the skeleton ascends. Then she continues the intake with the children.
In this case, the children need to thoroughly understand how dangerous seals are. They are dangerous big predators with strong jaws, long nails and fighting spirit, so Carla has to perform the intake with a stuffed seal. She explicitly asks the children what they can see on the skeleton of the seal that they want to maintain their distance from, implying that they should also do that when the kids are on the beach in a real life encounter with a seal. Only after the children have learned to be careful around seals when in physical interaction, they are allowed to take out the stuffed seal and do the intake. Carla contrasts the seal as dangerous with the seemingly cute looks of the seal. Seals incite many cute reactions from visitors with their big black eyes, small size with around one meter length and skinny posture when they just come into the seal center, or their blubbery fat when they wobble around two months afterwards, and their fuzzy fur when they are dry. Carla is aware of this, and constantly emphasizes that the seals only look cute. That is, the seals are cute only from a spectator perspective, not in physical interaction. The seal as dangerous and the seal as cute are held in tension in this play, with the explicit message that seals are ultimately dangerous.
The new director of the seal center clearly announced a shift in communication messages the seal center shares. When he got into his new position he argued that the seal is a ‘symbol’ of the Wadden Sea that stands for everything in which humans fail (Leeuwarder
Courant 2012: 22). Seals become bio-indicators of the Wadden Sea, which means that seals
give an impression of the health of the sea (Van Kempen 2017: 16). This is possible because seals are the predators at the end of the food chain. Microbes concentrate in seals, as seals take in the microbes present throughout the food chain. Pollutants such as micro-plastics also get into seals’ bodies. By knowing what inhabits a seal, people can know what resides in the sea. With the seal as bio-indicator who represents and symbolizes the environment, it is less about the individual seal and its suffering. There is more emphasis on the environment in which the seal lives: the Wadden Sea that needs to be protected. Conservation becomes prioritized over individual welfare of concrete individuals.
10 For translation see Appendix A.
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‘Cuteness’ and ‘dangerousness’ are both tropes that often concern ‘charismatic species’, a biology conservation category of species to which humans disproportionately turn their attention (Albert et al. 2018: 2-3). These charismatic species have the function to attract attention, which then extends to wider issues of conservation. Seals become symbols who signify the environment through their microbial make-up, standing as pars pro toto for a whole environment. Anthropological literature on charismatic species focuses on how humans attribute values, symbols and traits to charismatic species (Kalland 1993; Van Ginkel 2015). Anthropologist Arne Kalland (1993) argues that a ‘super whale’ has come into being in reaction to the whale hunt, to call attention to the intelligent, ecologically viable, socially valuable attributions to an ‘endangered’ whale. Kalland (1993) argues that all these attributions are only possible because the distinction between certain whale species fades away, and the sum of the qualities of different species are used to create a ‘super whale’ (Kalland 1993: 126). Anthropologist Rob van Ginkel recognizes this image of the Super Whale in a whale stranded on the beach of Texel in the Netherlands: “Humpback Johanna, [..] seemed to embody the super whale in all its dimensions: for a week or so, the animal became the hyperreal super whale – in the Netherlands at least,” (Van Ginkel 2015: 137). Even a concrete whale, in a specific story in the Netherlands, becomes a symbol and stands for so much more.
Both studies focus on communication, on representations imbued with many messages. In the seal center, seals are not just symbols to think with, but actors who people live with (Haraway 2003: 5). This adds another layer of complexity, where seals are in relation with visitors, volunteers and professional caretakers, who together contribute to meaning making.
Dynamics of cute and dangerous
Cuteness and dangerousness share a curious relationship. Maja Brzozowska-Brywczyńska (2007) shows that monstrous and cute tend to draw on one another leading to comic situations in popular culture. Referring to Chucky in the horror film Child’s Play, she points to how a cute doll is only a façade for a cold-blooded killer with a chainsaw (ibid.: 8). A bit less extreme, Puss in Boots, featuring in Dreamworks’ Shrek movies, pleads with big innocent eyes when he wants to get something done from someone, or uses them by means of distraction, and then skillfully waves his sword at his foes. Carla also points to cuteness as a façade by emphasizing that the seals only look cute, while they actually are not. With
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dangerousness and cuteness closely tight to political agendas associated with a priority to the environment or to individual welfare, these switches between cuteness and dangerousness become political.
Dynamics between cuteness and dangerousness get more complex when engaging with seals in practice. I had to learn this during my time in the seal center. In the training presentation - presented on the first day to volunteers - bite wounds are shown, stories of bites are told, and we are instructed to never trust a seal and always pay attention to their body language. In practical training, we quickly learned that each seal has a different character. That also means that some seals are cuter, while others are more dangerous. One day, both cute and dangerous followed each other up when I took care of two different seals.
First, I cared for seal Kayden by cleaning his area. Kayden is in a phase one area, as he has a lungworm infection. The seal area is a square of about 5m². About a third of the floor is 50 centimeters higher than the rest; this makes the ‘plateau’. The rest can be filled with water for the seal to swim in and can be drained if caretakers come in to feed and clean. This is called ‘the pool’. When I come in, Kayden’s back is tense. He curls his front flippers and pushes his long nails in the floor of the pool. I get tense as well and try to stay on the plateau as long as possible. While I am cleaning the plateau, he approaches me constantly, sticking his head out as if to bite, while I am still out of his reach. I am wary of him. When I finally step into the pool, it is okay at first. Then he suddenly starts to approach me and I put the bucket in between to protect myself. He is quick. He begins to fight with the bucket, almost throwing it over. I get very uncomfortable. I only finished cleaning one side of the wall, but to protect myself I go over to the plateau where Kayden cannot reach me. While I stand on the plateau, he is coming at me, stretching his neck towards my toes, showing a row of sharp teeth. Pushing him away with the squeegee does not help. “Okay, calm down,” I think, “I need to make a new plan.” I eventually call for the help of another volunteer. She is more confident with the seal, and together we manage to calm down.
In this case, dangerousness is being done and undone in an interspecies relational process within a specific situation. When I got into the area with Kayden, I already noticed he was tense. I am taught seals can be dangerous and bite hard, which made me wary and uncomfortable from the start. Seals finely feel your state of being, so as I got tense, the mood quickly spiraled down. The way Kayden and I responded to one another made both of us uncomfortable and stressed. We created a dangerous situation as I related to the seal as a dangerous person by which he responded in a risky way. With the help of the other volunteer, the atmosphere got more relaxed as both the seal and I calmed down because of her. She
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effectively undid the dangerousness of the seal. The dangerousness of Kayden is highly relational to who is with him and the chemistry the caretaker and seal share or not.
Directly after this experience, I go on to care for seal Piwi, together with another volunteer. Piwi has had a surgery to remove a toe and is in phase one longer than regular. When we come in to clean, she stays in the same place and looks at me. I move around with the cleaning tools, cautious to not make any unexpected movements. Piwi turns and lies on her back when I come close; it makes her look like a dog who wants to be petted. Another volunteer and I are melting. She is the first seal with whom I feel fine coming so close. My hands are just inches away from her as I clean the wall with a sponge in constant circles. Piwi stays calm. When I express my trust of Piwi to the other volunteer, she warns me to be careful because seals can bite unexpectedly. She recalls once when she was bitten by a cat. That was extremely painful and she had to get antibiotics. A seal bite must be even worse. I agree. I should be careful. But still, she seems so calm. When we fill the pool, Piwi sticks her head through the loops in the hose. It looks so cute! She explores the hose further. “Awww!”
Piwi becomes cute during this interaction. She is calm, rolls on her back and plays with the hose. I also feel calm and happy. I enjoy being with her, as does the other volunteer. Still, she emphasizes the potential danger of trusting a seal. I also move carefully, making constant circles with the sponge so as not to startle Piwi which might incite a risky reaction. Dangerous and cute co-exist in this case, but in a different way than before. Maintaining cuteness needs relational work from all involved in the moment. It is being done in practice, in collaboration with certain humans and certain seals. In interaction with Piwi, cuteness is being done as we are all calm and careful. Still, dangerousness comes into play as the other volunteer reminds me to be careful and attentive to maintain this cuteness, and not let it slip over to a dangerous situation. Thus, while Piwi invokes the cuteness in several of her actions, we also relate to her in such a way that this cuteness is maintained. It does not come naturally from Piwi’s appearance or actions; it is in relation to us and her particular mood that cuteness comes into being.
Cute and dangerous are outcomes of relational practices, in which both humans and seals play a role. As such, practices reproduce political agendas with an animal welfare or conservationist focus that are closely tied to cuteness and dangerousness of seals. Sometimes, cute and dangerous come into being in uncontrollable ways. I did not know how to calm the situation with Kayden, for example. As an inexperienced caretaker, I was tense and Kayden reacted, resulting in a dangerousness undesirable for both.
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Practices that lead to cute or dangerous situations are no innocent play. The dangerous situation with Kayden was quite unproductive. It was only with the help of another volunteer that I could continue my cleaning practices. Furthermore, it raised stress, which is counterproductive in a healing process. Liselotte, one of the experienced caretakers, reflects on this moment when I tell her about it in an interview. “Common seals have anxiety-aggression, so if you take away that fear, or reduce it to a minimum, they are also less aggressive.”11 According to Liselotte, aggression is not because the seals are dangerous. It is
because seals are scared that they do something dangerous. It is important therefore, to read the behavior of the seal as a caretaker. “He is not just aggressive, he is anxious and what can you do about that? Move slower, or give more space, this kind of things. And you will see if you pay more attention to that, the animals become much more relaxed, so it becomes easier and nicer to work for yourself as well.” If the caretaker is skilled and attentive, some control can be gained to undo dangerous outcomes of relational practices between humans and seals.
Through relational caretaking practices, both cuteness and dangerousness co-exist in the seal center. How they co-exist and when vary, depending on the practices, seals and caretakers. Visitors can watch these interactions through the windows of Intensive Cares, as I described at the start of this chapter. While guides spread a message of seals as dangerous predators, who are bio-indicators of the environment, what visitors see of seals is always unexpected. Because seals and caretakers influence what visitors see, guides have limited control to which messages are actually spread in the seal center. So it might be that visitors react with an “Awww” that signifies the seal’s cuteness when he slowly slides into the water to eat a fish, while Carla says that seals are dangerous and bite hard. Even though the seal center recently takes position on the population side in communication to their public, the presence of living seals and their interaction with caretakers make the visitor center a grey area in which both political agendas of animal welfare and a population perspective co-exist.
Conclusion
In this chapter, I have shown that ‘cute’ and ‘dangerous’ are closely related to certain political agendas of the seal center, which come together by the concrete presence of seals at the seal center itself. At the start of the seal center, common seals in the Netherlands were endangered. In concordance with animal welfare activists against the seal hunt in other countries, seals
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were described as extremely cute, innocent and cuddly. They were exposed to the brutal exploitation and carelessness of humans. Seals as needless sufferers are central in this movement, and this was also the way they were presented by the seal center and local newspapers. It encouraged care for the environment, to ensure the wellbeing of seals and prevent further suffering from an animal welfare perspective. As the seal population grew, and the director at the seal center changed, seals became more important as a symbol for the environment. Microbes and pollutants gather in the body of the seal, confronting people with the state of the Wadden Sea. The seal center focused the message on the environment more than on seals. This was important, as the ‘dark side of cuteness’ led to risky interactions between beach goers and seals. In the seal center, guides focus on the message of the dangerous seal to prevent such risky interactions and to encourage beach goers to keep their distance from seals they encounter. Even though the shift in message is carefully framed by the seal center in the information they relay with words and images, seals at the center are actors and have their own influence on messages shared. Importantly, cute and dangerous flexibly come into being during specific practices in which seals and their caretakers relate to one another. This depends on the particular caretaker and particular seal involved, as well as their specific moods at a particular moment of the day. In these highly specific moments, cute and dangerous are close to one another, and cute can slip into dangerous and vice versa. In this dynamic interspecies practice of caretaking that visitors can watch, seals have an influence on sharing a message of cuteness and dangerousness, which can be associated with their respective political agendas. The seal center becomes a grey area which reproduces animal welfare and conservationist perspectives. As such, the seal center prioritizes care for the environment and the seals as population, while the presence of seals in the center also draws attention to care for seals as individuals.
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2 Caring for persons
We are a professional seal hospital. People don’t know about all the effort we make here, about the protocols, that we have our own vets. It is not just a tub in which we dump a seal; there is a whole professional world behind it.12 – Head of visitor center.
Care for seals in the center is in many ways like care in a human hospital. The seals come in and need to be rehabilitated as fast as possible, as a constant flow needs to be maintained to make optimal use of limited space (Latimer 2000). Their stays are always temporary, and nurses (also called feeders/caretakers) and vets (in the role of doctors) look after their health, assisted by volunteers (in the role of assistants).13 They do this by very standardized
procedures, in which they bother the patient the least possible, but have multiple observation moments per day to make a medical indication. Like in a human hospital in the Netherlands, seals who come in, get a number and a patient record. Unlike in a human hospital, seals also get a name. The name is thought of by a volunteer or nurse and written down on the patient record, next to the number.
In this chapter, I will show how care comes with multiple relations between seals and caretakers, in which detachment and attachment to the seals is constantly negotiated for professionalization. I will show this through four examples from the intake to the release in which the name and naming of seals is central. As will become clear in this chapter and the ones that follow, caring for individuals tends to strengthen care for the population. Pictures accompany this chapter to notice and pay attention to seals as persons.
To stay with the diversity, tensions and contrasts that surface from the multiple examples, I will call the examined processes ‘currents’. I will build on theoretical frameworks that focus on practices in which the notion of care is never far away (Heuts and Mol 2013; Law 2010; Pols 2006). Jeanette Pols (2006) for example, distinguishes four ‘repertoires’,
12 For translation see Appendix A.
13 Among the nurses, ‘nurse’ was a contested term. Some thought the term conveyed all the tasks that the nurse
is required to do (observation, medication, so much more than only feeding). Some preferred the term ‘feeder’, to acquire some distance to the heavy emphasis of presenting the seal center as a hospital. Another term often applied was ‘caretaker’. In this thesis, I will use the term ‘nurse’ because that is what volunteers are initially taught to call them, and I agree that it better captures the full tasks of these caretakers. I use the term ‘caretaker’ when I do not make a distinction between a volunteer or nurse.
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which “[bring] together specific actions, ideals and knowledge,” (Pols 2006: 79-80). They are not enacted together, but they do co-exist and are sometimes in tension (Pols 2006: 80). Pols does not empirically show these tensions, but discusses them theoretically. Similarly, Frank Heuts and Annemarie Mol (2013) discuss valuation as a practice. From their field they distinguish five ‘registers’ of valuing. These registers are closely related empirically. In some practices they overlap, in others they run counter to one another leading to friction, and eventually to ‘prioritization’ or ‘compromise’ (ibid.: 134). This framework makes it possible to discuss various examples with one concept or practice in the middle, emphasizing the tensions and overlaps that surface in each of these examples, to then bring them into relation.
Similarly, I call the different practices surrounding names and naming ‘currents’. Currents convey the flows of practices in unruly directions. Currents sometimes rub against each other creating friction, while at other times they may flow in similar directions, perhaps joining and strengthening one another. Still, a current can be seen as an entity, although an unstable one, in which practices entail and produce ideals and relations as they flow. Furthermore, current is also applicable in the sense of time. In a specific ‘current’, practices develop in certain ways. Throughout this chapter, I explore the flows of four currents of naming and draw attention to them as unruly entities that relate and influence one another: the currents of personalization, identification, attuning and remembering.
Current of personalization
The intake room is being prepared, as there has been a WhatsApp message of a seal who will arrive soon. They say the seal has lungworms and is blind on one eye. The close-up picture of the blue, blind eye of the seal shown below accompanies the description. The seal is very warm, so they cool him with water before and during transport.
When the seal arrives, Amy, the nurse who picked up the seal by car, and vet intern Stella do the intake. They are dressed in a facemask, hairnet, gloves and blue shoes. Amy also wears an overall as she has direct bodily contact with the seal. Hygiene protection is essential, since zoonosis (cross-species infectious diseases) can go from humans to seals and vice versa, which has risks for both. Stella carefully turns over the basket and Amy catches the seal. Amy steps over the seal, holds the head and places her knees firmly next to either side of the seal’s body. Her upper body lingers above the seal, whose head she holds close to her chest to control his struggling. “The seal is extremely warm,” Amy communicates to the vet. Luckily
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the temperature is fine with 37.1 degrees Celsius.14 Stella places a tag in the hind flipper of
the seal with a number for recognition. Afterwards she puts some drops of fluorescein in the eyes to check for an ulcer. She checks the eyesight of the right, blue eye by moving her hand from far to closer to the eye in a fast pace. Nothing happens. She does the same check with the other eye. The seal snaps at her hand in a reaction almost quicker than we can see. Amy startles, her eyes grow big. Stella waves her hand. It was no hit luckily. Stella goes on, she measures the teeth. After the intake is done, they place the seal back into the basket and others transport the seal to the appropriate area. Amy asks if I want to name the seal. I call him Jip, which is written down on his patient record.
Figure 1 Common seal during transport. Courtesy of Seal Rescue Team.
14 A temperature around 37.0 degrees Celsius is a good temperature for a seal. From 38 degrees it points to fever.
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During this intake, a couple of individualization processes take place. The seal is taken from the beach to the seal center and physically leaves the population and relations he might have been connected to. Thereby the seal leaves its anonymity of being part of a general population of seals and gains attention as an individual in the seal center. The seal becomes a person, with his own needs and wishes. He is warm before and during transport and has to be cooled. The eye gets specific treatment with the fluorescein test, which was not used during other intakes. Moreover, Jip is asked to communicate to the vet about his own condition. When Stella almost wounds her hand by checking the left eye, he shows her this eye is fine. Finally, the seal becomes a person with a name by which he becomes officially part of the center, as every seal who passes the intake gets a name next to a number. Joanna Latimer (2000: 79) recognizes these individualization processes in human hospitals too. For example, patients are alienated from their families, as the presence of family gets limited by visiting hours. Annemarie Mol (2008) describes that clinics prescribe personalized care for patients who are then sometimes required to change their behavior. In many cases, it costs effort and persistence for patients to alienate themselves from the norm to receive personalized care.
Still, both authors also argue that this alienation does not lead to patients becoming autonomous individuals. Patients are drawn into new relations, for example to the medical staff (Latimer 2000: 90). Patients need to get used to how they communicate their issues with nurses. Jip is also drawn into new, interspecies relations in which he needs to adjust to the space the vet and nurse give him to respond. Furthermore, although Jip is taken out of an anonymous population of seals, he is situated in new categories that relate him to other seals by means of medical observations. Mol (2008: 58) calls these categories ‘collectives’. Jip comes to belong to the collectives of blind and lungworm infected common seals.
In this current, which I call personalization, naming is part of care practices that alienate and relate individuals in such a way that the seal becomes a patient who can be listened to and cared for. The current of personalization echoes ideals of taking a patient seriously, to get to know the patient through conversation in order to treat the patient personally with the most efficient, specified care. Engagement with seals as responding persons is therefore essential.
Current of identification
The name also becomes significant during other seal care practices. Six days after the intake, I am scheduled together with nurse Enrique to go to Jip and Noche, who are together in a seal
