Peace-loving Canadian
Posted on 03/30/2005 5:08:37 PM PST by Shermy
Thousands of commercial hunters armed with clubs, rifles and spears moved on to the ice floes off eastern Canada today to kill more than 300,0000 baby seals for their pelts over the next few weeks.
The spring hunt, which began yesterday, is expected to bring the area's coastal communities some £8.5m, but has been condemned by animal rights activists as barbaric.
This year's hunt is the third large-scale cull since the Canadian government decided in 2003 to allow almost a million seals to be culled over three years.
Article continues The move dismayed the anti-seal hunting movement, which has been going since the 1960s. Campaigners won major successes in the 1970s and 1980s to significantly reduce the scale of the hunt after convincing the US and EU to ban the import of pelts from young seals.
But last year's hunt was the biggest cull for more than 50 years. More than 300,000 baby seals were killed and a similar amount are expected to be culled this year by May 15, when the government's three-year plan ends.
The recent increases in the scale of the cull come at a time when demand for fur clothing has been rising.
The spring hunt starts around two weeks after many seal pups are born. Animal rights activists say the pups are clubbed to death and often skinned alive. Seal hunters and government officials who monitor the hunt insist the pups die instantly, under strict guidelines, including a ban on killing a seal pup less than 12 days old.
One campaigner, Rebecca Aldworth, of the Humane Society of the United States, is in the area to film the cull, posting footage on protectseals.org.
Speaking from the Gulf of St Lawrence, where the spring cull begins, Ms Aldworth, who has observed the seal hunt for the past six years, said yesterday: "It's just horrific out there. There is blood all across the ice and seal carcasses as far as the eye can see." Regulations require that hunters ensure the seals are dead before moving on, but Ms Aldworth said she had listened to some seals crying for their mothers, which give birth on the ice floes every spring. She said: "We've seen seals that were moving around and breathing, that have been left in these piles, some left conscious and crawling."
She claimed there were some 70 fishing boats in the area where she was filming but there were no government officials to check whether the seals were being properly killed.
Michel Therien, a spokesman for the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, disputed Ms Aldworth's account. He said there were two large Coast Guard vessels in the region and one fisheries officer for every seven or eight commercial vessels. "I presume they can't be in all the places, all the times, but we encourage the public to report any illegal activities, for sure," Mr Therien said.
He said fishermen needed to supplement their income, with many fishing families only earning £500 a year from their catches of snow crabs, lobster or cod. "They have to live on whatever they're capable of catching," said Mr Therien. "The seal fisheries is part of their livelihood."
The government argues that the hunt brings in badly needed income to coastal communities, primarily from pelt sales to Norway, Denmark and China. The DFO argues the country's seal population is "healthy and abundant", and notes that there are an estimated 5 million harp seals, nearly the highest level ever recorded and almost triple what it was in the 1970s. Fishermen participating in the hunt also blame seals for the devastation of Canada's fish stocks, in particular cod, and argue a cull is necessary.
However, a recent report by the International Fund for Animal Welfare said the harvest of up to 975,000 seals will damage the marine mammal population. "Any pretence of a scientifically based ... hunt has been abandoned and Canada's commercial seal hunt has become - quite simply - a cull, designed more to achieve short-term political objectives than those of a biologically sustainable hunt," the report said.
Aboriginal and Inuit subsistence and commercial hunters begin the first part of the cull on November 15 in Canada's vast expanse of frozen Northern waters, which reach from the Yukon Territories near Alaska through the Arctic Ocean and down into the North Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Labrador. After starting in the Gulf of St Lawrence, the spring part of the commercial hunt moves to the Front, an arc of the Atlantic Ocean sweeping out about 30 to 40 miles from Newfoundland.
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Batter up!
Oh, the sealmanity!
God,I hate this!
Hows it goin' eh?
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Meats Meat...and Furs Fur.....
big deal....
Good grief!
Is that a picture of
Democrat Party HQ
election night, 1994?
It would be so serene and peaceful if they just pulled the feeding tubes from the poor seals.
(semi-mandatory Schiavo reference)
Hey..here's a plan...get the Iraqi "insurgents" to start dressing like baby seals...the newfs will come in droves to iraq with there clubs...
okay bad idea...
Congrats on being the first to make the connection. It might be tougher to make the reference on the ancient pyramids in Wisconsin thread.
I like the way you think! LOL!
I can probably understand how they have a tough time making money out of crabbing.
When I was in Canada a couple of years back, I went crab fishing with the mom of my then boyfriend. She was a very out-doorsy type living on the Queen Charlotte islands, off the west coast of Canada.
Anyway to cut a long story short, it involved getting up at 5 a.m. to wade around in freezing waters with a net. Oh, I caught three crabs (no jokes!! haha!), but two of them were 'undersize' and had to be thrown back (They looked big to me!).
So after two hours wading around until I lost the feeling in my extremities (to put it mildly), I had caught ONE crab.
Oh! And I had to pay $40 (canadian dollars) for the priviledge to fish in the first place.
An experience that I'm glad I had - just for the story of saying 'Things I'll never do again in my life'.
I hunt and fish and butcher my own deer and chickens and whatever else p*sses me off, LOL!
This is not "hunting" by ANY stretch of the imagination. Very sad and disturbing that this still goes on...but aside from the "cute factor" involved, is it much different than the spearfishing Native Americans in my state can participate in each season, or the animal trapping that goes on every day in our country?
I once saw a fish skinned alive, and it ruined my day and still makes me almost sick everytime I remember it. My father-in-law used to at least club them on the head first.
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