POSTED BY: The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. DESCRIPTION: This is Paul Watson's official account about being attacked by sealers in the Magdalen Islands. It looks like the seal wars are back on. "Seals are meant to be clubbed, not coddled," said one representative of the Sealing Association. "Who does Watson think he is? Does he think we will exchange the club for a hairbrush? We are men, sealing men. We are not women." Sea Shepherd Conservation Society 3107A Washington Blvd. Marina del Rey, CA. 90292 USA Telephone: (310) 301-7325 Fax: (310) 574-3161 Internet Representative: Nick Voth <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> ============================================== **TEXT BODY FOLLOWS:** RETURN TO THE SEAL WARS by: Captain Paul Watson The barbarians were at the gate. They were drunk and they were angry, a mob of misguided illiterates hell bent on one thing - - to kick my ass, or worse. I could hear them surging through the second floor hallway of my hotel, viciously kicking and pounding at doors, terrorizing guests and screaming that they would kill me. In my room, I was not feeling very secure. Marc Gaede, our photographer, was with me along with two plain clothed officers form the Quebec Police Force. "What do you intend to do when this mob breaks down that door?" I asked. "We can do nothing." One said as he shrugged his shoulders, "We cannot defend you." A vicious kick to the door and a roar from the halls indicated they had located my room. I was in Room 201. Next door in Room 207, Lisa Distefano was with Chuck Swift. Media people from Europe and North America were in other rooms, all of them held prisoner to this terror. We had not expected this attack. We had arrived in these islands in the middle of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, not to protest sealing, not to interfere with any one's business, but to offer an alternative. I had discovered that the short, hollow hair follicles of the baby harp seal had excellent insulating qualities, ideal for making bed comforters and sleeping bags. In only a few days, Mr. Tobias Kirchhoff of Kirchhoff Bedding Fabrics of Germany would be arriving to offer jobs to sealers. He would pay 30Cdn per kilo for the hairs. We would be bringing jobs to an economically depressed region of Canada. These would be jobs created without having to kill a single seal. The molting hair fibers could be quickly and easily removed from the seals. Each pup yielded an average of sixty grams, gathered in less than forty seconds. The most attractive feature of the idea for me however was that the harvesting of the hair did not kill, hurt or even stress the animals. In fact, what we were proposing is a cruelty-free, non-lethal method of sealing. We were also looking at a way to save the fish. Only by increasing the seal population do the cod have a chance of recovery. This is of course contrary to what fishermen would have us believe. Less seals more fish they say. Unfortunately, the answer is not so simple. Ecological systems are both complicated and fragile. The truth of the matter is that the largest group of predators preying on cod are not seals but other species of fish. Historically when there were thirty million seals, there was no shortage of fish. Now both fish and seals are in decline. By finding a way to use seals without killing them, we would be helping both seals and fish and helping to restore the eco-system as a whole. The traditional sealers would have no part of a "sissy" plan for non-lethal sealing. "Seals are meant to be clubbed, not coddled," said one representative of the Sealing Association. "Who does Watson think he is? Does he think we will exchange the club for a hairbrush? We are men, sealing men. We are not women." Organized by a few, a meeting of the Sealing Association turned ugly earlier in the day. Reporters were ousted from the meeting and threatened to not interfere. By late afternoon, fired up on alcohol, the sealers occupied the lobby of my hotel and refused to allow anybody to enter or leave. We called the police and they refused my request to order back-up from the mainland. The ten officers on the island arrived at the hotel but made no attempt to disperse the crowd. The sealers screamed that they wanted "no part of a faggot idea like seal brushing." They were also angry with me personally for having interfered with sealing on the ice in the years between 1975 and 1983. The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and our ships had not been forgotten. Our success a decade before was a bitter memory for them. We now presented them with an opportunity for revenge. Martin Sheen went to the lobby and requested that the sealers come with him to the church to discuss the problem. They threatened to hang him if he didn't leave. Martin was then warned by an officer to return to his room and that his safety could not be guaranteed. "I was in fear for our lives," said Mr. Sheen. "This is the ugliest, most violent mob that I have ever witnessed." The door cracked, the door frame collapsed and the mob burst into the room. I jumped into the bedroom and barricaded myself with the bed against the door. A roar filled the next room as the sealers surged into the area where Marc and the two police officers were waiting. Both officers were shoved against the wall. Marc was thrown to the ground and pinned. I braced myself, shoulders against the bed, my feet firmly against the wall. It was like attempting to hold back a human avalanche. The force on the door was so powerful that my feet were driven into the wall. The door splintered and gave way as debris flown of arrogant ignorance surged through the doorway and poured into my room, stinking like a burst cesspool after a booze party. They were screaming with rage, their faces contorted with hatred. I turned to face them and it was the most terrifying sight of my life. At least thirty of them had entered the room with another thirty in the room behind them and two hundred more filling the hallways and lobby of the hotel. The vile madness in their eyes will never be forgotten. I knew with absolute certainty that I was a dead man. There was no escape. My back was against the wall. In my hand I clutched my only means of defense, a stun gun, taken from our ice equipment. Meant to discourage a rare attack by a male hood seal, the device could knock down a man without any problem. Three hundred of them was out of the question of course, but I'd be damned if I would die without a struggle. One of the ringleaders leaped forward and punched me on the side of the head. I dropped him with the stun gun and stuck another coming from the right. This confused the others momentarily. Another pulled my hair and punches and kicks connected painfully. I zapped a third sealer as two of them spit in my face. I was going down. The only thing that saved me was one large sealer with the sense to know they were going to far. He put his back to me to block the others and this stopped them long enough for two uniformed police officers to make their way to me, screaming for me to leave the island. I said that I would not. The cop screamed at me, "you will leave or you will be a dead man in one minute." "I will not submit to this mob, I will not go into that mob, no way." The cops grabbed me and pulled me from the room through a gauntlet of punching, kicking and spitting sealers. I felt my legs kicked away beneath me, I fell, stumbled, and then I was pulled to a waiting car and thrown into the back seat. The back right window shattered against my face. The cop behind the wheel jumped from the car to apprehend the man who smashed the window and a sealer jumped into the driver's seat beside the officer in the front and the car took off, leaving another sealer in the back. As the car left the parking lot, I saw the mob turn on Steven Douglass, a photographer from the London Daily Mirror. His cameras were smashed and they punched him in the face. At the airport, I was taken behind the security partition as the crowd surged into the small building. There were only three officers with me and three hundred screaming people hammering on the glass partition. The mob demanded that I wipe the blood from my face and pose for a photograph to prove that I was uninjured. I refused. The police told me that if I did not cooperate they could do nothing to guarantee my safety. I refused. I could not believe that the cops were taking orders from the mob. A plane had been ordered from the mainland. I waited before that enraged screaming mob for an hour and a half until the plane landed and I was escorted out on to the runway and sent against my will to Moncton, New Brunswick where I was taken to the hospital by the Moncton police and then released the next morning. This was not my first experience with mob violence in the Magdalen Islands. In 1979, my crew and I barely escaped with our lives after disrupting sealing activities. We had been prepared then, after all we were in the middle of the seal wars which ended in 1983 with a victory for us when the European Parliament banned seal pelts. These guys were obviously bitter losers who had little use for our attempts at reconstruction. What we had taken away we were willing to replace with a more positive industry and an approach that promoted life instead of death. The sealers were not interested in jobs or a better life. They simply wanted revenge. In the meantime, the terror had not stopped on the islands. The mob returned to the hotel to intimidate the rest of my crew and to demand film and videos from the media. A German television crew were told by police that their safety could not be guaranteed unless the videos were turned over to the sealers. They gave them five cassettes to appease them. Their main story had been successfully hidden in a snow bank. Bob Hunter of City TV in Toronto was also threatened but he also was able to trick them into believing he had nothing left. Satisfied that there was no documentation, the Quebec police told the outside world that nothing had happened. Oh, they said, "There was a peaceful demonstration, but no violence and Paul Watson voluntarily left the Magdalens when politely requested to do so by the sealers." All of us who were involved were astounded at the blatant lies from the police. We were even more astounded when much of the Canadian media echoed the lies and refused to run comments by journalists who had witnessed the incident. The next day when I called to request that charges be laid, the Quebec police spokesperson told me, "you were lucky to get off the island alive so don't push it." I was forced to lay a complaint with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) but was told by writer Farley Mowat who had contacted the Canadian Solicitor General's office that Canada would be most reluctant to interfere with an issue involving Quebec sovereignty. Meanwhile, an idea that could provide many jobs for unemployed islanders was violently rejected by sealers whose only market for seal remains the selling of the amputated penis to the Taiwanese voodoo medicine trade to be dried, powdered and mixed with tiger bone as a means of restoring impotence. All around the islands, we saw numerous bodies of seals left on the ice with just the penis removed. Given an opportunity to embrace life, the sealers of the Magdalen Islands decided to embrace death instead. **END OF TEXT** ============================================== The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society was created to help protect the world's oceans by enforcing international conservation law. Membership to the SSCS Mailing List is available from <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. Send your NAME, E-MAIL ADDRESS and REGULAR ADDRESS. ALL personal information is confidential. This document may be re-distributed, but only in its original form. *ONLY* documents containing this message may be considered official SSCS material. This document is protected with an encrypted signature file using the PGP program. Thank you.
