COMMENT
On March 15th, caring and concerned citizens around the world will be faxing and emailing Canadian Government politicians and officials to express their strong opposition to the slaughter of 350,000 baby harp seals and hood seals.
This annual slaughter takes place off the east coast of Canada and is heavily subsidised
by Canadian taxpayers, the majority of whom are against the brutal killing of these beautiful marine mammals.
The Canadian Harp seal hunt is the largest single mass slaughter of a mammalian wildlife species anywhere in the world.
Over one million harp seals are condemned to be cruelly slaughtered over a three-year period.
The Seal Hunt methods of kill? Clubs, picks, rifles and shotguns.
It is a grossly inhumane kill that goes mostly unregulated, as there are limited fisheries officer to watch and inspect the number of sealers on the ice. Credible witnesses have documented seals being skinned alive and tortured.
It is also an incredibly wasteful hunt where it is estimated that for every seal landed, another is shot and lost under the ice, not to be included in the quota.
The Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) insists that the seals must die so that cod populations can increase. Their position is that the harp seal is a major predator of the cod, yet there is little scientific justification for this position.
When the first European explorers landed on the East coast of Canada there was no shortage of cod, and there were an estimated 30 million seals. Today, there are fewer than 5 million (some estimates put the number as low as 2 million) and numbers continue to decline.
With cod populations at less than 1 per cent of pre-Columbian levels, the seal has become the scapegoat for the excesses of the Canadian and foreign drag trawler fleets that plundered the famous Grand Banks for decades, and left very little behind.
Now the seals are the target for Canada's continued mismanagement of marine wildlife.
This bureaucratic ordered destruction of the seals has no place in the 21st Century.
* Paul Watson is founder and president of Sea Shepherd.
Herald Feature: Conservation and Environment
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