Ban All Seal Products - End The Inhumane Slaughter

If ever there was a time to send a message that could really make a difference for the seals, that time is now.

The cruel mass slaughter of hundreds of thousands of harp seal pups can be ended if the European Parliament passes a pending bill banning all seal products into Europe.

This bill will also help end the slaughter of South African fur seals in Namibia and will put an end to the years off effort by seal defenders to end the obscenity of sealing.

The Canadian government is spending millions of dollars sending delegations to Europe to lobby against the ban. The seals need people to let the Parliament know that the majority of people worldwide want the largest mass slaughter of a marine mammal species in the world to be ended.

Fact you should be aware of:
   1. The Canadian government is trying to convince the EU Parliament that the seals being killed are all adults. This is because the government of Canada defines an %u201Cadult%u201D seal as any seal over three weeks of age.

   2. If the hunt is %u201Chumane%u201D as the Canadian government insists it is then why is it illegal to observe the killing of a seal.

   3. The harps seals are also being threatened by global warming which is causing loss of ice habitat and this is not factored into the quota decisions of the government.

   4. This is the largest slaughter of a marine mammal species in the world.

   5. The Canadian government has rejected offers to create alternative employment or to have people pay the sealers to not kill seals.

   6. Seal pups have been filmed suffering in agony on the ice after being clubbed, stabbed, shot or kicked by sealers.

   7. The government of Canada tries to link the seal hunt with aboriginal communities despite the fact that the commercial hunt is not an aboriginal hunt. No one is opposing Inuit sealing in the far north. The opposition is to the mass slaughter in Eastern Canada especially Newfoundland where the aboriginal peoples were exterminated a century ago. There are no native communities in Newfoundland.

   8. The Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans has a record of incompetence with regard to management of the fisheries. Every single commercial fishery in Canada is in trouble because of DFO mismanagement.

"We cannot agree with this commercial hunt because it's not a hunt, it's a mass slaughter," she said. "I don't think a commercial hunt, with these kind of numbers and in those conditions, can be humane."

Sealing has no place in the 21st century.

Most of the Canadian media have been bullied into parroting the Canadian government party line that the seal slaughter is sustainable, humane and good for the economy. Mike Duffy on CTV has been so biased in his support of this ridiculous position that he has lost all pretense to objectivity as a journalist. And of course the CBC or the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has for years been referred to by seal defenders as the Controlled By Canada network.

And for years the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society has been saying that the seal slaughter is a burden on the Canadian tax payer and little more than a glorified welfare project.

It makes no sense, especially if you calculate the real economics of killing seals in Canada and why the Canadian government is spending to keep the sealers in the barbaric style they have become accustomed to.


Just take a good look at the millions Ottawa spends subsidizing the seal hunt, then maybe by the time you've finished this you'll be ready to sign on the dotted line

Whether you think killing seals is a bad thing or a good thing, whether you think it barbaric or humane, you should oppose Canada's annual seal hunt.

According to Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) the justification for the hunt is to provide economic opportunities for Canada's coastal communities. Last year, according to its Web site, this entire economic opportunity amounted to $12-million, the value of all seal pelts landed. They fetched on average $52 a pelt. According to evidence given to Parliament's standing committee on fisheries and oceans on Nov. 6, 2006, half of that is eaten up by expenses, so we are talking, at most, $6-million that flowed to the sealers themselves: one-tenth of 1% of Newfoundland's GDP. (This year it will be even less, because pelts of three to four week old "beaters" that make up 95% of the catch are selling for between $6 and $33.)

This $6-million costs Canadians at least 10 times as much and does so year after year. First of all, there is the cost of deploying the Canadian Coast Guard (CCG) to the seal hunt for seven weeks each year. Last year it involved 10 vessels, many of them icebreakers, helicopters and patrol planes. Nobody in government knows, even less wants to know, what this costs. DFO claims it costs nothing because the boats and aircraft are owned and the crews are on salary. Does it cost nothing to put out fires in Toronto because it owns the trucks and firefighters aren't on piecework? Toronto hires firefighters and buys trucks based on the anticipated number and severity of fires. A significant part of what CCG does is rescue sealers. Some 24% of its 2003 fishing vessel rescues derived from this hunt. Without it, CCG's annual budget could be significantly reduced. One hunt-deployed icebreaker, the Amundsen, costs $50,000 per day to operate in winter. Given DFO's lack of transparency, one can only estimate the annual CCG cost attributable to the hunt at $5-million.

Secondly, every year some disaster occurs. Last year, it was heavy ice that trapped sealers for days on end. Some even ran out of cigarettes! DFO calculated the extra CCG costs due to heavy ice at $3.41-million. It also paid $7.9-million to owners of boats damaged by ice. This year, it is the drowning of four sealers and the near drowning of two while being rescued by CCG. This resulted in the cost of an unsuccessful week-long 2,800 nautical square mile search for one of the drowned and his boat involving patrol planes, helicopters and three icebreakers. The inevitable lawsuits and legal bills will easily cost more than $6-million.

Thirdly, millions are spent every year trying to counter bans on the importation of seal products. Our NAFTA partners and four European countries have imposed bans. Four countries have announced intentions to do so. Italy and Luxembourg have suspended imports. The European Parliament resolved to impose an EU-wide ban. The Council of Europe has called on its 46 members to do so.

Canada has taken Holland and Belgium to the World Trade Organization in Geneva. Aside form being terribly expensive, it jeopardizes a relationship with two countries with which Canada has a trade surplus. $5.2-million of raw seal products constitutes less than 1/1,000 of what we export to Europe.

The DFO, since at least 2003, has been flying high-level delegations to Europe to argue against the bans. Last year, there were at least six such junkets. For example, on March 27, 2007, a 17-person delegation was dispatched to the British Parliament for a meeting attended by only five British MPs. Last month, seven Canadians, including Loyola Sullivan, ambassador for fisheries conservation, the Premier of Nunavut and a Newfoundland Cabinet minister flew to four European capitals for a week.

Unfortunately, they seem to use a travel agent who excels at finding the most expensive fares available. When Mr. Sullivan flew on seal business to five European capitals this January, the airfare alone was $10,270.80. The DFO's Kevin Stringer flew to Paris for $4,459.65 on Sept. 5, 2007. Of course, this is nothing compared with the $16,025.25 spent on airfare to Australia and New Zealand by the DFO's director general of economic analysis whom I wish would do an economic analysis of his own expense accounts. With hotels, wines, meals and support staff, this adds up.

They have as much chance of stemming this tide as Germany did of stopping the Allies after D Day. The battle is lost. But because of ideological fanaticism they keep fighting, secure in the delusion that the Canadian taxpayer, like the cod, is an inexhaustible resource that will forever fund this foolishness that only benefits the high-end European tourism industry.

Fourthly, there is the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) led boycott that is largely responsible for the inflation adjusted $465-million drop in the value of Canadian exports of snow crabs - the main seafood export to the United States from Canada's sealing provinces - since April, 2005. The value of 2007 snow crab exports is 44% lower than it was in 2004, the year prior to the boycott.

HSUS has to date persuaded almost 3,600 U.S. businesses to participate, including heavy hitters Publix (annual sales $24-billion), Whole Foods ($7-billion), WinCo Foods, Lowe's Foods, Harris Teeter ($3-billion each) and smaller, seafood-driven ones like Legal Sea Foods ($400-million). Sealing creates less than 1% of the value of the sealing provinces' fishery. Sacrifice 99% for the sake of 1%. Now there's a business plan!

Finally, there is the cost of the DFO seal-hunt bureaucracy, which alone has to cost more than the sealers earn: license issuers, accountants, typists, file clerks, inspectors, quota setters, regulation drafters, "scientists," "statisticians," "economic analysts," speech writers, media relations officers, anti-boycott propagandists, writers of replies to angry letters, arrangers of tours of European journalists (when the seal hunt is not taking place), all in the service of what DFO says is 5,000 to 6,000 (more like 2,000, I believe) people averaging $1,000 a year from killing 275,000 seals. There is a conflict of interest in the DFO having jurisdiction over the Coast Guard. If it were controlled by the Minister of Defence, he'd immediately see that for what he is spending on the seal hunt, he could outfit an artillery regiment.

Enough already. This is a colossal waste of taxpayers' money. And the sealers? Sealers should prefer these monies be used to train them for jobs in the 21st-century economy, rather than to preserve them as relics of a hunter/gatherer one.

<b>Scapegoated Seals Save Cod</b>

<i>by Anthony Marr</i>

Once, while driving from Toronto to Ottawa %u2013 a four hour trip at 100
km/h - I picked up a hitchhiker shortly after leaving Toronto, who,
after a few kilometers, unabashedly announced that he was a
Newfoundland sealer. Straddled with Canadian civility, I did not
jettison him, but asked him instead whether he would consider
walking from Toronto to Ottawa with me.

"What for?"

"The two cities are 248 miles or 390 km apart. If you line up all
the seals you guys kill every year in a single file, the line of
some 350,000 seals, at a bit more than one meter per seal, would
stretch from the CN Tower in Toronto all the way to the Parliament
Building in Ottawa. I think, out of respect for these sentient
beings, the least you can do is to walk a Funeral March for the
Hunted, from the first one you kill to the last."

"A funeral march for seals? That's ludicrous. They don't even have
souls, for Christ's sake."

"Speaking of souls, I might suggest that you take the Funeral March
as a penance. It would be good for your karma, too. Some cultures
would believe that you will reincarnate as a seal next life, one
destined to be skinned alive, if you don't do something about it
now."

"Yeah, right, I'm quaking in my boots already," he sneered.

"Personally, though I do find reincarnation a fascinating concept, I
don't believe this interpretation of it either. I just can't look
at an innocent baby seal and think that it used to be an evil human
baby-seal killer, reborn to be skinned alive by other baby-seal
killers, to atone for that ex-baby-seal-killer's crimes. It would
be adding-insult-to-injury of the worst kind. But I do think that
walking the 390 km on the Funeral March for the Hunted would be good
for your soul, if you have one."

"Sorry to say this to you, pal, but your 390 km is way off base.
Most of the seals we kill are just babies as young as two weeks
old. They don't measure up to a meter in length. Your line of
seals would be well short of 390 km; 300 km max. So there."

"I rest my case," I said, without bothering to argue that adult harp
seals average 1.8 meters long, which would counter-balance the baby
seals' shortfall, or point out that the sealers and even the
Canadian Fisheries Minister have been dismissing the word "baby".
Instead, I asked, "How can you justify this kind of carnage? Don't
you have feelings?"

"Sure I have feelings. But it's no skin off my back." The sneer
broadened into a lopsided grin. No seal could ever produce an evil
expression as this, that's for sure.

"Do they have feelings?"

"Who? The seals? I don't know. And, frankly, I don't care."

"Can't you feel their pain?"

"Not a bit. I hear them scream. I see them writhe. But I feel
just fine. In fact, the more seals I kill, the better I feel."

"Don't you also feel just a bit cowardly to torture and kill a
pup whose mother cannot defend, who can't defend himself, and who
cannot fight back?"

"Better a living coward than a dead hero, is what I say."

"Have you no pride?"

"How much is pride a kilo, eh? How much per kilo do you
sell courage for? Come to think of it, pride and courage are very
expensive- to buy. So, you can keep'm. As for me, I have seal
skins and seal penises to sell, at a hundred bucks a pop, or should
I say, a pup, haha."

I was beginning to see red. I took a moment to cool
down. "I believe that deep down you do feel some pain, however much
you succeed in conceling it from yourself. Really, tell me. Why do
you do it? You don't make all that much of money out of it. You're
primarily a cod fisherman."

His eyes lit up above the grin. "Aha! I kill seals because they
eat fish, cod in particular. The more seals, the fewer cod, the
fewer seals, the more cod. Plain and simple. There are some 5
million seals out there. They eat up a hell of a lot of cod. So, I
don't get enough."

"I think you got too much. It is called over fishing. And you're
scapegoating the seals for your own blunder driven by greed," I
could have sounded a little less hostile, but I'm not a seal; I'm
human.

"We follow the law. If the law says it is okay, it is okay. The
law says it is okay."

"Only 3% of a seal's diet comprises cod," I pointed out.

"3% of the total amount of fish eaten by 5 million seals is still a
lot of cod."

I pressed on, "In other words, 97% of the seal's diet consists of
other fish species that prey on cod. Without the seals controlling
the population of the predatory fish species, the amount of cod
eaten would be many times greater."

"I've heard that before. It's just a theory, and a vague one at
that. There is no proof."

"I don't know about you, but we on the west coast have proof," I
asserted.

"What proof? Your harbour seals there eat salmon. I'm sure the
same law of nature applies. More seals, fewer salmon; fewer seals,
more salmon."

"That's just it. It's just the opposite. On the west coast, it is
more seals, more salmon, fewer seals fewer salmon," I sought to
humbly inform him.

"That's ridiculous. Where's your proof?"

"Before I provide the proof, could you tell me what fish species the
harbour seal preys on?"

"Salmon, of course, and some others, maybe herring, smelt, hake,
mackerel, something like that."

"There are about 20 major fish species on which the harbour seals
feed. In descending order of volume consumed, they are rock fish,
Pacific sand lance, Pacific herring, Pacific staghorn sculpin,
smelt, Pacific tomcod, lamprey, flounder, shad, flatfish, Pacific
hake, Shiner surf perch, gunnel, prickleback, juvenile salmonids,
Northern anchovy, adult salmonids, Peamouth chub and Pacific
Macheral, as well as cephalopods like squid."

"So?"

"Where are the salmonids on this list?"

"I thought you were going to give me some kind of proof," he said
evasively, but in doing so, jumped from the pan into the fire.

"Do you know that there used to be a commercial seal hunt on the
west coast too, combined with a bounty hunt?" I asked him.

"Can't say that I do."

"Well, it happened in the late 30's through into the 60s. By the
late 60s, the seal population had become so decimated that the hunt
was banned in 1969. The ban stays in force today. The seal
population has recovered."

"Bad news."

"Good news. According to your formula of more seals, fewer salmon,
fewer seals, more salmon, the salmon population in the 30s, 40s, 50s
and 60s should be high and that in the 70s, 80s and 90s should be
low. Correct?"

"Damn right."

"Well, just the opposite is true."

"More seals, more salmon; fewer seals, fewer salmon?"

"Correct."

"I don't believe it."

"Believe it."

"What do you have to back this up? "

"Could you open the Road Atlas to British Columbia?"

He did, reluctantly. "This better be good."

"Pick a river. Any river."

"Why?"

"Just do it."

"Alright. The Kitimat River."

"Do you know about escapement?"

"Sure. It is the number of adult salmon that make it all the way up
to their spawning ground to spawn in a salmon run. What about it?"

"Now, let's see. For the Kitimat river, the 1950s escapement of
Chum salmon averaged 16,700; 70s, 26,400; 90s, no mistake, 129,000.
For Chinook salmon, 1950s, 4,100; 80s, 9,900; 90s, 16,700."

"You're making things up as you go."

"No. Just photographic memory. Try another river."

"I don't particularly want to play this silly game."

"It is no game. Why don't you write down these numbers, and check
them in a government library in Ottawa when we get there?"

"A waste of time."

"So, you are afraid to find out?"

"Not at all, `cause I know you must be wrong. So, lie some more.
Here. The Babine River. What numbers are you gonna make up?"

"1950s, Babine River escapement of even-year Pink salmon average
11,800; 60s, 41,000; 70s, 106,000; 80s, 202,000; 90s, 214,700."

"The Kishwan River."

"1950s, escapement of Chum salmon 4,000; 60s, 1,150; 70s, 7,350;
80s, 13,200; 90s, 21,000."

"The Pinkut River."

"Escapement of Sockeye salmon in the 50s, 27,200; the 60s, 40,500;
the 70s, 73,900; the 80s, 241,000; and the 90s, 260,900."

"Enough of this crap! Even if these are true, they are west coast
harbour seal and salmon, not the east coast harp seal and cod."


"And the natural law is different in the west than in the east?"

"If your figures are correct, it damn well is."

"So, are you going to do a funeral march for the seals you slaughter
or not?"

"Why should I? They eat my cod."