Canadas 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 its 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)
Director of the Sierra Club USA (2003-2006)
Director - The Farley Mowat Institute
Director - 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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