Canadian seal hunt suffers European pressure

Cod actually composes only a small amount of the harp seals' diet.  The cod industry in Canada/Newfoundland crashed from overfishing, a fact that the Canadian Dept. of Fisheries now finally admits on its own website.  As far as tradition goes, seals were once taken for use by the indigenous people of the area.  And they only killed what they needed to survive, not the 250,000 baby seals that are butchered now. Unfortunately those people were pretty much wiped out by the settling Europeans.  At least when the original inhabitants killed the seals, they used all of it.  Today's seal clubbers skin them alive half the time and send the pelts so someone in Russia can satisfy their vanity with a coat.  Did you know that there is a company in Germany who was willing to pay the seal killers more money than they make clubbing seals to obtain their hair by a non-lethal method (BRUSHING) but the Canadian government said no? Did you know that most of the pups from the last couple of years drowned due to poor sea ice and the rest were killed anyway?

The people who live in these areas could absolutely rake in the money by giving eco-tours - letting people see these beautiful animals in their own environment.  What is happening now is a tragedy and an affront to nature.  There is no place for this brutal mammalian torture/slaughter in the year 2008.

I BEG EVERYONE READING THIS -  go to www.harpseals.org and get the facts for yourselves.  Then do something to help these animals.  Boycott Canadian seafood, write to your representatives, participate in the International Day of Action...do something before another innocent species goes extinct due to the arrogance and ignorance of humans!

There is a peculiar tendency of Canadians to shift the blame, pointing bloody fingers at other countries while refusing to clean up their own backyard. The idea that seals are livestock is ludicrous, they have been part of an ecological balance for millions of years and Canada is destroying that balance. Canadians used the same tactic when they wiped out vast stocks of North Atlantic fish. An impoverished Newfoundland joined Canada after they had exterminated the Beothuk Indians, the Labrador Duck, the Giant Auk, the Walrus, the Newfoundland wolf and ravaged the populations of sea-birds and pilot whales. They fed pilot whales to mink in cages until the whales just simply disappeared. They joined Canada reluctantly because Canada offered them the baby bonus -- they would receive money just for having kids. That was the deal clincher for Newfoundland. As for the lie the seal killers and the corrupt politicians in the Canadian government keep floating around, "Seals are overpopulated": More than half the seal nurseries disappeared last year because of ice loss due to global warming and up to 90% of the pups were lost. The Canadian DFO which is composed of essentially corrupt officials, can't and won't make an accurate account, surveys indicate close to three million..compared to their original population of 40 million.. probably much lower, and dropping like a stone.

A completely false argument of the seal killers is that seals eat all the codfish. It was Canada that wiped out the vast populations of cod, haddock, whiting and plaice with their greed and their factory trawlers. The diet of seals is ONLY 3% food fish like cod. The main diet of seals is the predators of the fish like skate and squid, so therefore the vast populations of fish that Canada had destroyed by 1992 will never come back since the predators numbers have grown with the brutal massacres of seals. Another propaganda point is that seals are killed for food. They are not. Seals are killed for the fur market in Asia and their carcasses are discarded on the ice. The rotting flesh can't be sold and the Canadian government buys them up as an indirect subsidy. Even the fur prices have plummeted to half because of lack of buyers. In collusion with this mafia, Norwegian factory they shipped furs to illegally burned furs to try to drive the prices up. The sealers and the government officials that support them are essentially a small group of organized mafia. Another bogus argument is this is necessary income for "poor" people. There are only a few people who do these atrocities in the offseason for EXTRA money, many actually travel from the cities. Last year the income of this group was a paltry six million, one 20th of 1% of the revenue of the East Coast. The main income of the sealers is in various fisheries throughout the year, shellfish such as snow crab makes up a huge portion of that. The economy of Newfoundland grew by 9%, so there is no scarcity of jobs.

These few sealers are in fact acting like traitors to Canada. To earn the pitiful $6 million profit they bilked the Canadian taxpayer for over $30 million dollars in subsidies (Coast Guard helicopter/ship support, overseas propaganda vacations for corrupt officials, etc) and cost Canada half a billion dollars in boycotts, much of that snow crabs, the mainstay of Newfoundland. To add insult to injury, many sealers are plagued with alcoholism and drug use and many do not work the rest of the year, collecting welfare checks instead.

The Canadian seal massacres are the largest most savage extermination of wildlife in history. The cruelty is unspeakable and sickening, with scenes of mother seals screaming trying futilely to revive and protect their bloodied cubs from the relentless clubbers. That is why the European Parliament is banning the seal trade in all 27 member states, and why the US has banned it since 1974. An independent veterinary investigation revealed that 42% of the cubs were still conscious while they were being skinned alive. Europe has received 660 documented/filmed cruelty cases, including seals being skinned alive and large numbers of whitecoats illegally clubbed. Large numbers of maimed and wounded seals which escape to slip under the ice and die a slow death are never included in their kill counts.

Canadians are selfish and narrow-minded if they think an entire species or population of seal even belongs to Canada. Arctic seals are a world heritage and were here millions of years before Europe sent their ex-convicts and refugees to Canada and before those immigrants exterminated the real Canadians, the Beothuk Indians living on the East Coast. Those Indians had no effect on seals, and they would not agree with a greedy factory operation by a handful of thugs to slaughter millions of seals for the fashion industry in Asia. Canada's factory bloodbath on the ice has nothing to do with either native survival or "tradition".