People eat meat out of necessity. Seems simple enough, right?
Then why don't we eat humans? It's generally considered wrong to eat an intelligent species because it's believed that their intellect affords them certain inalienable rights to life. Many marine mammals, including seals, have keen intellects for animals, usually being rated higher than dogs and cats. Most people in the West would think that eating a dog is barbaric, but we actually beat baby seals to death with clubs. Not only that but there are verified reports of
dragging conscious seals across the ice floes with boat hooks, shooting seals and leaving them to suffer in agony, stockpiling dead and dying animals, and even skinning seals alive.
There is a reason that most countries have laws about humane killing of animals: torturing animals is wrong.