Posted on 07/05/2003 7:37:30 AM PDT by mhking
ST. JOHN'S, Nfld. (CP) -- An American conservation group is calling for an international boycott of the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver-Whistler because of an annual seal hunt that takes place on Canada's East Coast.
The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society based in Malibu, Calif., said the games, scheduled for February and March, will coincide with the time the seal hunt begins.
"These dates fall at the exact time that the notoriously cruel, largest marine mammal slaughter in the world takes place on the East Coast of Canada," the society said in a statement found on their Web site.
"The Olympics will be hosted by the province of British Columbia, where the government is calling for a slaughter of seals and sea lions."
The radical environmental group was founded in 1977 by Paul Watson, one of the environmentalists who founded Greenpeace in Vancouver in the late 1960s.
Officials in Newfoundland and Labrador are calling the campaign to condemn the seal hunt unprincipled and based on falsehood.
Mark Small, a sealer from Wild Cove in western Newfoundland and former president of the Canadian Sealers Association, said no laws are being broken.
"We're just going on, trying to run our industry, following the rules and regulations that the federal government has laid down," he said.
The society is planning an advertising campaign to depict seal clubbing and shooting as an Olympic event.
"The Newfoundland sealers have a game called head hockey, where they use a baby seal's head instead of a puck," Watson said in the release.
"These games will provide us with an international peg to hang our message that the cruel, wasteful, economically insignificant slaughter of seals must end."
John Efford, MP for Bonavista-Trinity-Conception, said the head hockey story is unfounded.
"This is total fabrication and lies," Efford said.
"To get into a debate with an organization such as that is just degrading Newfoundlanders and Labradorians and Canadians in general."
Watson's group says between the now and the end of the 2010 Games, more than 2.4 million seals will be clubbed and shot on the ice floes off Newfoundland.
Efford said primitive hunting methods such as clubbing are not part of the seal industry.
"No Newfoundlander clubs seals, either inshore or offshore," he said.
"Nobody wins on the fabrications of stories like the Sea Shepherds are doing."
Reg Anstey, secretary-treasurer of the Fish, Food and Allied Workers' union, said the society's campaign is simply an effort to raise funds.
"This group has no concept of what we do here and they don't really care," Anstey said.
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