This has been an extremely distressing day: First Stephane Dion wimps out on us and passively lets Stephen Harper continue the war on the Afghanistan people to 2011 and beyond, a disgusting slaughter on its own...But hey, if we are going to slaughter humans, why not kill seal pups too, and while you are at it, you might as well kill off the poor, the prisoners, the naysayers, the first born child of every family...Wait this sounds very familiar....I thought you might want to know that the Canadian government no longer gives a sh*t about us, nor anything living thing on this earth, they just want too fill their pockets with money, their fat cat friends' pockets with money and laugh at us as we are crying for JUSTICE! LET US UNITE! WE HAVE TO, IT IS GOING TO BE TOO LATE, WE MUST FIGHT NO MATTER WHAT! Come on Canadians let's kick these fat cats out, let's stop putting our cash into their fat pockets, lets get sustainable, lets email their asses off, and lets spread the word!
Here is an excerpt on the inhumane seal hunt, and also check out another article on Canadian Press, our government is absolutely and totally corrupt. Sign the petition here
Article By Rebecca Aldworth (Humane Society International)
This spring marks a macabre anniversary for me: It is the tenth year I have observed commercial seal hunting in Canada at close range. In that decade, I’ve seen things that still haunt me every day and night. But nothing could have prepared me for what I just witnessed in Nova Scotia.
Two weeks ago, the government of Nova Scotia and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans opened a protected nature reserve to commercial seal hunters. Fishermen were authorized to club more than 2,000 baby grey seals [PDF] to death on Hay Island, a part of the protected Scaterie Island Wilderness Area off Cape Breton.
I and my colleagues from Humane Society International and the Humane Society of the United States—along with a representative from the Atlantic Canadian Anti-Sealing Coalition—traveled to the site of the massacre by ZodiacTM.
Before the hunters arrived, Hay Island was a stunning, wild, and windswept vista. A tiny plot of land off the larger Scaterie Island, it faces directly onto the Atlantic Ocean. Its stone beaches surround grassy, snow-covered hills—the habitat of grey seal mothers and their pups.
Everywhere across the island, seal pups nursed from their mothers, their soft calls drowned out by the sounds of the ocean waves crashing onto the rocky shores in the distance. Some of the newborn pups were covered in white fur; others, a few days older, had already moulted their white coats. The moulted pups have the most valuable skins, and the hunters meant to kill them.
On the opening day of the seal hunt, we arrived at Hay Island after the killing had already begun. We climbed out of our ZodiacTM onto the rocky beach, facing a high ridge beyond which we could not see. As we clambered over it, we noticed a steel pail in which sealers had left wooden bats covered in blood—an ominous indicator of what lay ahead. Directly behind the bloody pail lay a newborn whitecoat seal pup, crying pitifully. She was terrified and bewildered, unable to comprehend the violence happening around her. Her calls struck a chord deep within me. There is something about the misery of a newborn creature, confronted with violence even adult humans cannot stand to watch, that defines exactly why commercial seal hunting must end.
As I looked up, it took a full minute for me to understand what I was seeing in front of me. Hunters had herded moulted pups, newborn seals, and mothers together into groups. They bashed the moulted pups with their crude wooden bats, slicing them open with box cutters. Inches away, the mothers tried to put themselves between their babies and the sealers, but they were no match for these men armed with wooden bats.
“Come here, little buddy, I have something for you,” yelled out one sealer as he ran directly at a terrified pup huddling in a crevice beside a rock. Without a second of hesitation, the sealer raised his bloody bat and struck the seal pup. The repeated thuds of the clubs against the skulls of the grey seal pups sounded out across the island, constant and sickening.
Soon, the grass and snow of Hay Island was covered in vast pools of blood. The surviving newborn pups were moving miserably through the carnage, red blood smeared across their white fur. Bloody trails led away from the killing sites to the areas where dead pups were being winched onto a sealing boat stationed just off the island.
I saw my horror at the scene reflected in the some of the faces of the government officials there. No one could watch this brutality and remain unaffected. Even the sealers seemed to realize there was something wrong with what they were doing; they would deliberately stand in front of our cameras to prevent us from filming as they smashed in the skulls of the baby seals.
I moved through the killing fields, apologizing to the surviving pups, over and over again. The site of their home, their sanctuary, being turned into an open air slaughterhouse by these ruthless invaders was too much to bear. What had once been one of Nova Scotia’s wilderness treasures had been destroyed by the commercial sealing industry.
It is unthinkable that the Canadian government is allowing grey seals to be slaughtered commercially. By 1949, commercial hunting had almost wiped out this population, and it has only begun to recover to any real extent in recent years. While the Department of Fisheries and Oceans has attempted to portray this recovery as a population increase, it is hard for any population not to increase when it is starting at close to zero.
Fishermen have long scapegoated grey seals for the impact of destructive commercial fishing methods on fish stocks. They say that grey seals are preventing fish stocks from recovering, despite the fact that there is not a shred of evidence anywhere in the world that this is the case. But despite this, the Canadian government allows fishermen to promote the myth that killing grey seals will somehow help the ecosystem to recover. And that is exactly how the Canadian government and the government of Nova Scotia have tried to sell this devastating slaughter to the public.
But it won’t work. We will hold the government of Nova Scotia and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans accountable for their behaviour. The footage we filmed is being provided to governments around the world to show the depths to which the Canadian government will sink to appease the fishing industry lobby. We will not forget the suffering of the grey seals. And the horrible deaths of these seal pups over the past two weeks will not be in vain.
A local supporter from Cape Breton remarked to me after our first day of filming the grey seal slaughter, “I’ve always thought the grey seal hunt would end the harp seal hunt in Canada.” She believes the cruelty of this slaughter, which occurs in areas people can see it, will wake up Atlantic Canadians to the reasons why all commercial seal hunting must end.
She may well be right.
As we prepare to depart for the much larger harp seal hunt just a few weeks from now, I hold that thought in my mind.
The end is coming for the commercial sealing industry in Canada. Allowing the grey seal slaughter to happen in the Hay Island sanctuary was the biggest mistake the Canadian government could have made. They will live to regret it.
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