Capt Paul Watson on Ending the Seal Slaughter Canada - response to Loyola Hearn

[Annces]

Captain Paul Watson Responds to Canadian Fisheries Minister Loyola Hearn

(printed in full with permission of author)






Mr. Loyola Hearn’s Statement on Slaughter Celebrations:

For far too long, anti-sealing groups have tried to shine a negative spotlight on Canada’s legal and humane seal hunts and in doing so have needlessly tarnished the reputations of our coastal communities, and our country. Their arguments, based largely on questionable studies and emotional rhetoric, have only succeeded in uniting federal, provincial, territorial and commercial efforts to defend this important cultural tradition and economic driver along Canada’s eastern and northern coasts.

I applaud the efforts of industry, as well as the governments of Nunavut, and Newfoundland and Labrador to up the ante in addressing the unfounded claims of anti-sealing groups. Through celebrations that acknowledge our sealing heritage we are succeeding in getting the real story about humane and sustainable sealing out to the public.

Today is not only a day to celebrate the important contribution that sealing makes to the success of fishing families, it is when we must ensure the truth about sealing is heard clearly around the world – above the din of anti-sealing misinformation.

The Government of Canada stands up for Canadian sealers and will continue to defend their interests at home and on the world stage. We continue to make improvements to our hunts using the best available science. We are challenging unlawful bans on Canadian seal products in Europe at the World Trade Organization and we will consider all available options to ensure the long-term sustainability of the hunt well into the future.









Captain Paul Watson responds:





As long as hundreds of thousands of seal pups continue to be bashed and slashed on the ice floes of the harp seal nurseries, Canada will remain a nation of wood hewers, water carriers and seal clubbers, in other words a nation where the uneducated, the ignorant and the arrogant set the bar on morality to the level of dung on the ground.

In this age of computers and high tech industry we actually continue to have troglodytes subsidized by tax-payers bashing in the delicate skulls of seal pups, skinning them alive and selling their genitalia for voodoo snake oil virility potions and this year they want to make the ice run red with the blood of over 325,000 seals, representing the largest slaughter of any marine mammal population on the planet.

It is the seal slaughter that has tarnished Canada’s reputation not the movement to protect lives from the brutal clubs of the sealers. I myself was raised in an Atlantic fishing community and as a child I was ashamed of the men who went out to slaughter seals. As one sealer once said to me, “every year we gets to go out on the ice, get away from the old lady, drink beer with the boys and whack seals.”

I have seen seal pups sightlessly scrambling over the ice with their eyeballs hanging out screaming in pain. I have seen seal pups skinned alive. I’ve seen sealers kick seal pups in the face and I have seen pick up pups by their flippers and bash them against the ice.

The seal hunt will be ended and we will never retreat from opposing it until it is ended. As a Canadian I fight not only to end the suffering of the seals and to protect the seals from extermination but also to restore my dignity as a Canadian. As a twelfth generation Canadian I cannot call myself a proud Canadian as long as this annual ritual of blood lust is allowed to obscenely stain the reputation of all Canadians.

There is no humane way to kill a seal and the hunt is not sustainable. Where once there were 45 million seals (harps, hoods, grey, harbour and the now extirpated walrus) we have less than 3 million seals. Where once there was an abundance of cod living in harmony with tens of millions of seals, we now have less than 4% of the cod populations left after rapacious slaughter of both fish and seals. Our claims of cruelty and diminishment are very well founded and documented and this evidence cannot be negated by some slippery words from what is a paragon of deceit – a politician.

Fortunately our din is louder and more powerful than the whining of people who believe they have a right to inflict suffering and death for profit. The truth about sealing is that it is profoundly cruel and it is a threat to the survival of the species and it is obscene.




http://www.seashepherd.org/editorials/editorial_080319_1.html

[flvegan]

1. "Best available science"?

Where the hell is the science in this:



Loyola, you are truly a dipshit of the highest order.

[Annces]

3. The bureaucrats just repeat lines

They really have no feeling for what goes on. If one of them were made to go and witness the event, they would never be able to sleep.

[ConcernedCanuk]

2. If one knew about the MILLIONS of cattle, chickens, pigs, etc. that are kept in squalor to feed us

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A few thousand seals is squat.

Start showing cow calfs and how they are slaughtered

Start showing how chickens are kept and slaughtered

Start showing how pigs are slaughtered

WE do this for a business

The people hunting seals do it for survival - long before the "white man" ever got here.

So when someone can show me how "humane" we are in slaughtering all the animals WE eat.

I give the sealers a pass on this one.

[Annces]

4. He is discussing seals here, not livestock

And the whole thing is subsidized. Why don't they use money to educate the Newfoundlanders to learn a different trade. Pure lazy thinking to just let them go kill for a living.

[flvegan]

6. Especially since much of this is about their own overfishing.

This is a cull of the competition. Nothing to do with heritage.

[flvegan]

5. Soooo, we can't be concerned for the seals AND the cows, et al?

I'm equally outraged. Sea Shepherd is a marine protection organization, so farm animals aren't their field of work. Also, since both Watson and all the SSCS outings are vegan, I have to think they share the concern.

You may give them a pass, I say they can go fuck themselves.

[MasonJar]

7. Thank you for sharing the total balderdash of the lowest of the low: seal murders

and politicians who excuse the cruelty in the name of money and culture. Thanks to all who bring this travesty to light and hopefully kindle a spark to save the innocents. As to our voracious and inhumane policies in the USA, what else is new? We are a brutal, insensitive people. Money is our driving force. That is why I am a vegetarian. Hopefully we can take a lesson from Captain Watson and speak out more forcefully against our own vicious treatment of precious beings that share our planet.

[ConcernedCanuk]

8. Lowest of the low is the POTUS and his supporters

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A few seal hunters is no threat to the world - the USA is killing millions of people with their voters consent.

Don't get confused with a society that has hunted seals (not endangered by the way) for food and clothing for centuries,

and a society that wages global war for - - what?

de-limbed Iraqis by USA "smart" bombs

now THAT's humane

gimmeabreak