The Case for Canada's Harp Seals

[Guest guest]

The Case for the Seals

 

Source > http://www.seashepherd.org/news/media_070315_1.html

 

3/15/07

 

The Canadian government is entrenched with the position that harp seals

must die. They do not intend to give an inch. Having caused the widespread

disenchantment in Newfoundland because of incompetent mismanagement of the

fisheries, they have chosen the seals as their scapegoats. This is the same kind

of political scapegoating that the Nazi’s exploited the Jews for. The only

difference is that the massive cruel slaughter of seals does not involve the

murder of human beings. However, the principle is the same.

 

Sea Shepherd has been opposing the seal slaughter since the day we were

established in 1977. It has been a thirty year struggle. The commercial

slaughter was shut down n 1984 but was revived again in 1994, two years after

the collapse of the North Atlantic cod fishery.

What the Federal government of Canada has managed to do is to deflect

criticism from Newfoundlanders away from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans

(DFO) and redirect it towards the seals – blaming the seals for the decline in

the cod and offering a temporary economic solution of a mass slaughter of seals

to provide for a market created through the efforts of massive tax-funded

promotional schemes.

The annual slaughter of seals is the largest mass killing of a marine mammal

population in the world. It is a ruthless, merciless enterprise that has scarred

the image of Canada around the world.

Last year, when someone from the Canadian Consulate in Los Angeles said that

the effort to protect the seals was a losing cause, Sea Shepherd Advisory Board

Member Martin Sheen responded by saying, “Lost causes are the only causes worth

fighting for.”

What can Sea Shepherd do?

We cannot get a ship into the ice. Both of our ships are on the far side of

the world having just returned from Antarctica to Australia. Even if we left the

day we got back from the whale defense campaign, we could not have made it to

the seal slaughter in time.

Captain Paul Watson has been ordered by the government of Canada to not go

anywhere near the East Coast of Canada for two years or else he will be arrested

and incarcerated until the killing is over. Canada is also working on extending

the exclusion zone making it a crime to approach within a mile of a seal being

killed. In Canada it is illegal to witness or document the killing of a seal.

High tech cameras can still capture the gruesome images from a half a mile away

so the new regulations are meant to make the documentation even harder.

If Sea Shepherd sends a ship in, it will be seized by the Canadian Navy. If

Captain Watson leads a crew to the ice, he will be arrested before he can reach

the ice.

Sea Shepherd is fighting these measures in court. We have retained one of the

best attorneys in the province of Prince Edward Island to challenge the

regulations as a violation of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. We

are also appealing the convictions of Captain Watson and eleven of his crew for

breaking the so-called Seal Protection regulations by approaching a sealer in

the process of killing a seal in the spring of 2005.

We are working in cooperation with the Humane Society of the United States,

Harpseals.org, and with numerous other international organizations working to

end the slaughter. Captain Watson is a director of Harpseals.org, an

organization established for the specific objective of abolishing the Canadian

seal slaughter. Harpseals.org is leading a large protest against Canada’s seal

slaughter in Los Angeles today. We are also working with members of the European

Parliament to have all seal products banned from import into Europe. We are in

the process of mounting a high profile media ad campaign to oppose the slaughter

and promote the boycott of Canadian seafood. We continue to target Red Lobster

as a major corporation that supports the seal slaughter. We continue to boycott

Costco for selling seal oil capsules in their Canadian stores. We are organizing

a “monumental” protest on March 15 at Canada’s Parliament buildings in Ottawa

led by Canadian Sea Shepherd activist Steve

Thompson.

Canada may be able to physically stop us from going to the ice this year but

they cannot stop our ongoing efforts to abolish the world’s most cruel and

massive marine mammal slaughter.

The movement to end sealing is growing, and more and more people around the

world are becoming enraged by Canada’s support and subsidization of cruelty and

slaughter. Our job is to keep the movement strong with new strategies and new

ideas.

Additionally, Sea Shepherd is working with Francois Hugo and Seal Alert in

South Africa to oppose the horrific annual slaughter of South African fur seal

pups in Namibia.

Sea Shepherd was the first organization to send a ship to oppose the sealers

in 1979 and the last organization to do so in 2005. Captain Watson has been

fighting the seal slaughter since 1968. We have had victories, for example in

1983 when our blockade of sealing ships prevented the slaughter of 76,000 seals

and the decision in 1984 by Europe to ban baby seal pelts. We have created

alternatives to the “hunt” such as our idea for a cruelty-free non-lethal form

of sealing where the naturally-molted hairs of the seals can be gently brushed

from the seal pups and can used in the same manner as eider down

because the hollow transparent hairs share the same

insulating qualities as the eider duck feathers.

Sea Shepherd also encourages ideas and strategies from members concerned about

the slaughter. Individuals can make a difference! Steve Thompson, for example,

has taken it upon himself to organize and lead the March 15th Ottawa protest.

Sea Shepherd is currently tackling shark finners and fish poachers in the

Galapagos, Japanese whalers in the Southern Oceans, working on plans to counter

illegal Icelandic and Norwegian whalers, and addressing the slaughter of

dolphins in Japan, fur seals in Africa, and illegal longlining worldwide. With

the oceans of the world under increasing assault by outlaw activities plundering

life in the seas, the tasks before us our daunting and formidable. We will

continue to do what we can with the resources available to us, and as our

support increases, so too will our ability to intervene.

 

 

Sea Shepherd Conservation Society welcomes your support. To

learn how to support our conservation work, please visit our donation page.

 

 

 

 

 

 

P.O. Box 2616, Friday Harbor, WA 98250 (USA) Tel: 360-370-5650 Fax:

360-370-5651

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