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)
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
FAQ
Search
Profile
Private Messages
Log in/Register/Password
