An Interview with Documentary Filmmaker Anne Troake: Reflecting on Anti-sealing Activism and its Impact on Rural Coastal Peoples in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
he anti-sealing cause pioneered in the late 1960s, and ongoing to this day, is arguably the environmental and animal rights cause that defines the 20th century environmentalist movement (Allen, 1979;Dauvergne and Neville, 2011;Phelps Bondaroff and Burke, 2014).Decades of carefully crafted media and image events, cultivated repertories of photos and films clips, and masterfully orchestrated and placed interviews and opinion pieces by activists all merged into a crescendo of vilification directed at rural sealers, their families, and community members to the point of a dehumanization in much of the national and international press and discourse in urban society in mainland Canada, the United States, and Western Europe (Dauvergne and Neville, 2011).The peoples and cultures caught in the crossfire between activists and their self-anointed moral cause of ending seal hunting are largely ignored, devalued, and shunned by antisealing activists and their supporters (Burke, 2020(Burke, , 2021)).Enter Anne Troake.Troake is a Newfoundlander born in the rural northeast coast community of Twillingate.With generations of her family and fellow community members who are part of Newfoundland and Labrador's seasonal fisheries, Troake has used her talents as a filmmaker and artist to help represent those silenced and harmed by activists.Drawing upon her experiences as a Newfoundlander with direct connections to sealing, Troake is now one of the most articulate and well-recognized voices in the counter-activist movement on the sealing issue.This interview provides readers with a glimpse into Troake's point of view on what led to the substantial and ongoing experiences of cultural and economic harm stemming from the conduct and messaging of anti-sealing activists.Troake's insights also suggest that the activists may have inadvertently helped to preserve and entrench the visceral identity and cultural connection between the peoples of Newfoundland and Labrador and sealing practices and heritage by inflicting a shared, collective experience of violence and a need for survival for local peoples on a previously unknown scale.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.074 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.013 | 0.036 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".