Canada’s Annual Ritual of Shame Began Today

[Guest guest]

Canada’s Annual Ritual of Shame Began Today

 

Mon, 2 Apr 2007 16:56:56 -0700

 

Report from Captain Paul Watson

 

This morning, the hot blood of the baby seals began to cool and congeal on

scattered patches of ice where surviving harp seals lay.

 

After weeks of mass horrific mass drownings, as baby seals slipped from

melting, crumbling and broken ice in the cold blackness of the Atlantic, the

merciless clubs of Canada ’s hordes of barbaric sealers began to once again

smash mercilessly in the fragile skulls of defenceless seal pups.

 

The perverse slaughter of baby harp seals has begun and this after an

estimated one quarter of all the seals born this year have already perished due

to the consequences of global warming. Canada wants to kill 275,000 survivors

and the sealing boats are scouring the shore fast ice and searching for

scattered pans to unleash their club toting thugs upon the defenceless.

 

The slaughter is underway, the largest massacre of marine mammals on the

planet and it has been sanctioned by a Newfoundlander who holds the position of

Minister for Fisheries and Oceans. He has this week demonstrated a complete and

utter contempt for the science and the reality of global warming and has set the

kill quotas solely for the purpose of appeasing the seal hating fishermen of

Newfoundland .

 

What has been an annual tragedy of immense proportions is now despicably more

abhorrent considering that the killers are dispatching survivors of hellish

conditions on broken and melting ice floes. These seals have struggled and

suffered to survive the natural elements and now they lay upon small pans of

broken ice with no means of defence or escape.

 

What a cowardly bunch these baby killers are. They are an embarrassment to

Canada and as a twelfth generation Canadian whose family is rooted in the

Maritimes, I am disgusted at the brutality and the obscenity of this mass

slaughter on the ice in the ravaged nurseries off the Eastern Canadian shore.

 

I am unable to go to the area this year because of a court order that bans me

from half my own country. I was convicted recently of the crime of witnessing a

seal being killed and ordered to pay a $3,000 fine and prohibited from entry to

the Atlantic coast for two years.

 

We associate being banned with apartheid in the former white ruled South

Africa and now Canadians are being banned for simply witnessing an atrocity in

Canadian territory.

 

Canada argues that the seal “hunt” is the most humane well regulated animal

hunt in the world. If so then why is it a crime to witness or document it?

 

But more importantly why are sealers being allowed to savage the survivors of

the greatest die-off of seals in history due to global warming? Adding a quota

of 275,000 seals to an estimated 250,000 killed by lack of ice gives us a

staggering 525,000 seal deaths for 2007.

 

This is not a hunt, it is a massacre. It is an attempt to exterminate a

species.

 

The Canadian government will argue that this is not so. Why would they wipe

out the seals that sealers depend upon for their livelihood? The same argument

was made in defence of over-fishing of the cod. The cod were wiped out and will

never recover because of the incredible arrogance and ignorance of the Canadian

Department of Fisheries and Oceans.

 

The harp seals are being systematically exterminated and the DFO is overseeing

this so called final solution because the seals are the scapegoats for the

mismanagement of the fisheries. If the government blames the seals and promises

a solution to fish recovery with the removal of the seals, the voters will

continue to back them and since Fisheries Minister Loyola Hearn is dependent

only on the voters of Newfoundland , he need not care for the concerns of

Canadians outside of Newfoundland .

 

The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society predicted the extermination of the Cod

as far back as 1982, ten years before the fishery crashed. We said in 1992 that

it would not recover and it has and will not recover.

 

We are predicting now that unless these madmen at the helm of DFO are

relieved, the harp seals will be driven into the oblivion of extinction because

of over-hunting and global warming.

 

Although we cannot get a ship into the ice this year, we are working to

undermine markets for seal pelts in Europe . We are in the courts with a lawsuit

challenging that the regulations preventing the witnessing of the slaughter are

unconstitutional. We are continuing to promote the international boycott of

Canadian seafood products and we are organizing protests internationally.

 

We are working to get our ship the Farley Mowat into a position to challenge

the sealers in the Gulf of St. Lawrence in April of 2008.

 

Only through massive economic pressure will Canada surrender it’s policy of

brutality on the ice floes off Newfoundland . We must work to intensify this

pressure and we must work to ensure that Canadian businesses pay a huge price to

endorse the slaughter. This level of cruelty and wanton slaughter has no place

in the 21st Century

 

 

 

 

Captain Paul Watson

Founder and President of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (1977-

Co-Founder - The Greenpeace Foundation (1972)

Co-Founder - Greenpeace International (1979) of the Sierra Club USA (2003-2006) - The Farley Mowat Institute - www.harpseals.org

 

 

 

 

" Sail forth - steer for the deep waters only,

Reckless O soul, exploring, I with thee and thou with me,

For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,

And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all. "

- Walt Whitman

 

 

 

 

www.Seashepherd.org

Tel: 360-370-5650

Fax: 360-370-5651

 

 

 

Address: P.O. Box 2616

Friday Harbor , Wa 98250 USA

 

 

 

 

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[Guest guest]

this is terribly frustrating and sad.

In Africa, THere are those who formerly dealt in the illegal killing

of elephants to make jewelry from one small portion of their bodies.

Those people still exist, but the safari tourism has slowed it.

 

It makes me wonder. Are protests and bans effective? Or do they just

cause animosity among a set of humans so hardened and evil that they

scoff and laugh at our sense of ethics and humaneness.

 

Maybe we need to start flying tourists in to see the seals, so the

locals can make their money that way?

 

just a desperate thought...