Baby Harp seal
Posted on 03/02/2006 7:00:04 AM PST by LouAvul
Opponents of Canada's seal hunt have a powerful ally in their bid to end the annual slaughter: Paul McCartney, who has pledged to take to the ice floes and frolic with the doe-eyed pups before the harvest gets under way.
The former Beatle and his wife, Heather Mills McCartney, arrived Wednesday night in this small fishing community on Canada's Atlantic coast and intend to land a helicopter on the ice in the Gulf of St. Lawrence on Thursday if weather permits.
The longtime animal-rights activists want to publicize the plight of the fluffy white pups, which are calved and weaned from their mothers on the frigid ice before being clubbed to death.
The United States has banned Canadian seal products since 1972 and the European Union banned the white pelts of baby seals in 1983.
The British government is also considering banning the import of seal goods. Groups such as Respect for Animals and the Humane Society of the United States, which are coordinating the McCartneys' visit, are encouraging people to boycott Canadian seafood as a show of solidarity.
"I think the McCartneys are two of the most visible people in the world, and with them drawing attention to the fact that this hunt is still going on, this is going to get that message out across the world," said Rebecca Aldworth, who will be observing and documenting her seventh seal hunt for the Humane Society.
Aldworth said the McCartneys quizzed her long and hard about the annual harvest, including the economic benefits that sealing brings to the local fishermen, whose livelihoods were devastated when the Atlantic Ocean cod stocks dried up in the mid 1990s.
The Canadian government endorses the harvest as a cultural right for many Maritimers and announced a hunting management plan in 2003 with a quota of 975,000 seals over three years.
About 325,000 seal pups were killed during the hunt last year, bringing the local fishermen $14.5 million in supplemental income, which they say their families badly need during the winter offseason.
The dates for the spring leg of the hunt have yet to be announced as the unseasonably mild temperatures in northeastern Canada have made the ice thin.
Federal Fisheries Minister Loyola Hearn said Canada would not terminate the annual hunt and insisted it is the most regulated mammal harvest in the world. The government says the country's seal population is abundant, estimating there are 5 million harp seals.
"I would encourage Mr. McCartney when he comes here to see the effect this is having on the economy and to realize this is sustaining people in their home communities," Hearn said.
Aboriginal and Inuit subsistence and commercial hunters begin the kill Nov. 15 in Canada's vast expanse of frozen northern waters. The spring leg of the commercial hunt starts in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and then moves to the Atlantic Ocean about 30-40 miles away from Newfoundland.
Harp seals have been hunted commercially off Newfoundland since the early 1700s. They were first harvested for their oil, but now are culled mostly for their pelts, sold mostly for the fashion industry in Norway, China and Russia.
The seal hunt is NOT A HUNT - it is a slaughter! I am very pro-hunting but this is NOT hunting its wasteful slaughter!
I'm no tree hugger or PETA supporter, but this barbaric slaughter of baby seals should be stopped. It serves no useful purpose. Wear cloth coats, folks.
Good grief. McGyver, now a has-been Beatle. I'm going to buy everyone in my family seal fur lined slippers next Christmas.
I agree, but look at those numbers. 325,000 pups in one year with a current population of over 5 million.
The idea that there will not be dramatic economic results to the fishing community without these culls cannot be taken seriously. Imagine even a 50% natural survival rate and you are talking about doubling the population of Harp seals in about a decade.
Baby Harp seal
I guess some animals are more equal than others. Would people feel the same if baby seals weren't so gosh-darned cute?
I'd have a lot more respect for McCartney if he agreed to live in some Newfie's house for a year while the Newfie lived in his house for a year.
Classy how a near-billionaire criticizes how someone in one of the poorest areas of the world makes a tough living. Maybe they should go back into the leaky coal mines under the ocean floor. But what would McCartney know of that?
"About 325,000 seal pups were killed during the hunt last year, bringing the local fishermen $14.5 million in supplemental income, which they say their families badly need during the winter offseason."
It may in fact be a slaughter instead of a hunt, but these people need the bucks this provides. If it were my choice, do this and feed my kids or let them go hungry, I'd be there doing it.
If the only way you can feed your children is to slaughter baby mammals by clubbing them to death in front of their still-protective mothers, going ahead and skinning alive the ones who don't quite killed or knocked unconscious by your poorly aimed bashes, and leaving a number of the mothers mortally wounded, to die slowly because they tried to defend their pups from your savagery, then you urgently need to stop having children, and you need to teach the children you have that they must under no circumstances have any children themselves until they're in a position to support them without behaving like complete barbarians. Nature will limit the seal population in a much less savage manner, largely by reducing the number of births, as mothers who've eaten less will produce smaller litters.
kids CANNOT pick their parents nor where they're born. Once born, they must eat..I don't pretend to defend this action of "hunting" the seal pups, but I do understand the instinct to take care of ones family..besides, what they're doing is legal until declared otherwise by the gov't..
I'd let the government feed my kids long before I'd do this, and it's not like the Canadian government wouldn't feed them.
Normal quick-kill hunting generally affords the animal a death no slower, no more painful, and no more terrifying than nature would afford. That's hardly the case with this seal hunt. As for trapping, many forms of it are extremely inhumane. Anyone who puts out one of those steel-jawed leg-hold traps ought to do serious prison time IMO. I'm not familiar enough with all the possible methods of trapping to say which, if any, I would consider humane.
I don't necessarily trust the Canadian Veterinary Journal, nor do I know how they obtained their sample of seals. There have certainly been plenty of other veterinary reports over the years with very different findings. There has been substantial documentation over many years, of viciously inhumane treatment of the seals, disgusting behavior of the hunters towards activist-observers (like exposing themselves, and worse, to female observers), and the undisputed dumping of hundreds of thousands of skinned carcasses which are left behind to rot, by these allegedly dirt-poor hunters who apparently aren't poor enough to be bothered with all that fresh meat.
The problem with the leg-hold traps is precisely that they do NOT afford a quick death. Badly wounded animals are often left struggling in them for days, and some even chew off their own leg to escape, only to die of infection or gangrene afterwards.
There has been substantial documentation over many years, of viciously inhumane treatment of the seals,"
If you are referring to the Greenpeace, U.S. Humane Society, and other animal rights propaganda, it is just that.
Greenpeace's documentary in the 1970s of this seal hunt has been the SINGLE biggest fundraiser for an AR group in history. However, a Canadian investigative journalist proved years ago that Greenpeace PAID sealers to cruelly kill the seals in the documentary for impact.
As for Paul McCartney, he and his first wife also urged the public to boycott funding Easter Seals, etc., because they are (Linda was) against animal testing for medical research. That didn't stop Linda from using state of the art medical procedures (developed from animal testing) when she was fighting breast cancer.
Naturally the AR groups are all over this seal hunt -- it is a proven hefty fundraiser, since baby seals are so cute.
I have no doubt that the animal rights groups focus on the most egregious examples and present them as the norm, but the seal "hunters" have provided them with a steady supply of egregious examples. And if Greenpeace bribed some hunters to stage barbaric acts for their cameras, that doesn't exonerate seal hunters, just places Greenpeace in the same disgusting category as the hunters. Nobody could bribe me, or any civilized animal hunter, to engage in acts of wanton cruelty against animals. In addition, the Canadian authorities bring criminal charges against a significant number of seal hunters each year, suggesting that there are a lot of truly awful things going on (certainly many more than number against whom charges are brought, unless these Canadian authorities are running the most efficient law enforcement operation in human history), and also suggesting that in the absence of some monitoring by law enforcement authorities a lot more would almost certainly be going on, and was going on before animal rights groups honed in on this particular issue and forced the Canadian government to take at least some minimal measures. However, the most loudly touted measure is completely meaningless -- they're no longer allowed to kill babies that are still white, but instead have to wait another week or so 'til they start turning brown and THEN bash their heads in. That may satisfy a few mushy-headed people for whom "cuteness" was the issue, but it certainly doesn't make a crumb of difference to any rational person. If anything, the slightly older baby seals are more aware of what's happening around them, and then to them.
"Cuteness" is not on my radar screen as far as animal cruelty is concerned, though the cuteness of baby harp seals has certainly helped the animal rights groups gain attention and sympathy for their cause. The depravity of human beings who are capable of approaching any baby mammal who is eagerly discovering life under the watchful eye of its mother, and bashing its head in with a club, and bashing the mother too if she tries to interfere, is a very grave matter in my opinion. If someone really has to do things like this because their own young are literally starving, that's one thing, but freely choosing to do it is a sign of a very dehumanized mind. These seal hunters are forever giving lame interviews about how "it's part of our culture" and similar garbage, and their children are obviously not starving or thousands of tons of edible seal meat wouldn't be left behind to rot. If your culture sucks, change it.
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