Neil the Seal is Tasmania’s wildlife celebrity – a global internet sensation

Saved by humans when still a pup, he’s now an orphan, doomed to return to deserted beaches by habit. He’s living a life of abandon.

At an estimated 1,000 kilograms he’s not yet half grown. He wreaks havoc on bollards, poles and traffic cones, as he scratches off his fur and top layer of skin, and practices for the territorial fight he’ll probably never have. He has become strangely anthropomorphised – as if his appearance is so unrecognised, and the species so unknowable, he can only be understood as an honorary human. He’s been given a harmless, de-wilded human name as well ‘Neil’, old mate Neil, sleepy Neil, forgetful and a bit slow. But the beach remembers his kind. It remembers the ancestral shapes of seal wallows, laid over each, lolling and galumphing, the colossal battering fights. Here before there were any human sounds.

At colonisation in 1802, there were massive herds of elephant seals, and in fact, further north on King Island, there's a bay named Sea Elephant Bay where it’s estimated over 10,000 seals were present. Of course, now only the sand and the shell grit remain covering their bones.
 

They are selling T-shirts with Neil’s face and the slogan “I Do What I Want” meant as a homily to nature, but really it is an expression of what humans do. Nature of course, does not do what it wants; it does what it must and what humans allow it to do; it is humans who do what we want, what we choose. There is love for Neil to be sure – until there isn't. Until someone gets hurt. Then, like the bite of the family dog at the barbeque or that of the shark in the bay, the connection will be reset; there will be no debate, and the choice will crystalise: to have him destroyed. In fact, the once-adoring crowd will demand it of the very authorities who saved Neil in the first place. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. Let’s hope the resources can be found from across the globe, from somewhere, to keep Neil safe, or perhaps to relocate him.

But now all seems well-managed by the wildlife custodians. The crowd have been controlled and corralled behind an invisible spectator fence.

With his moult over, Neil woke up and lumbered down to the beach for an evening swim and didn’t return. Maybe for five months, maybe longer, and hopefully through some miracle of biogeographical gravity and species coalescence, he will feel a stronger pull than habit, that of his own lost herd yearning for connection 1,500 kilometres away on the sub-Antarctic Macquarie Island. Maybe the ancient migratory pathways will become visible for him, revealed in the weaving language of the Southern Ocean currents, and they will carry him to his other home that still exists, the one that is not deserted. And arriving, he will haul out on unpeopled sand and hear above the reach and wash of the breakers the barks and grunts and snorts of his own kind. 

A remnant no more.