Donal Mahoney- A Poem

Stop the Clubbing of Baby Seals,

a Modest Proposal

The United Nations has learned burly men still club baby seals to death on ice floes in the Arctic.

Killing baby seals angers animal rights advocates who have lobbied hard to stop these killings. Some now want Planned Parenthood to supply female seals with the Morning After Pill so they can enjoy the company of bull seals without conceiving. 

Even if Planned Parenthood were to agree to do this, there is another problem. Bull seals are humongous brutes that force themselves on females, giving them no choice but to lie there until the bulls are spent. But after such an experience, many a female seal might welcome the Morning After Pill.

It's very difficult, however, to get female seals to ingest the Morning After Pill. Many seals suffer from bulbar myasthenia gravis, a condition that makes swallowing difficult, thus explaining the tendency of seals to throw their heads back and gulp fish in one swoop. 

It would be difficult for Planned Parenthood staff to fetch a fish from the ocean, implant the pill, and throw the fish back before it dies as a result of being too long out of the water. Of course, a significant government grant might enable Planned Parenthood to work on this problem.

 

The Morning After Pill is thought to be a safer approach than performing seal abortions. Few veterinarians are skilled in performing abortions on an ice floe, a dangerous procedure for any supplier of reproductive health services, given the slippery surface. In fact, not long ago, one veterinarian who had performed 400 seal abortions slipped while doing his 401st. He fell into the sea and never surfaced. 

The seal clubbers, on the other hand, say they have a better answer to the problem, claiming the United Nations should classify the clubbing of baby seals as an approved form of late-term abortion and then recommend the practice be adopted wherever seals proliferate and add to overpopulated ice floes. Anyone who has watched the National Geographic Channel has seen such floes. 

Further updates on this matter will be issued as studies continue in mankind's efforts to find a positive solution to the seal overpopulation threatening the world today.

Donal Mahoney lives in St. Louis, Missouri.