Canada Stop Killing Seals - Protest at Canadian Embassy

by - Fri Mar 18, 2005 14:23

Reporters Without Borders (March 11) (11/3/05) wrote to the Canadian justice minister with its position on an important question of law for online media that has been raised by a former UN official's libel action in Canada against the Washington Post,

namely can a journalist whose article has been published on the Internet be sued anywhere it can be downloaded ? The Washington Post appealed on 8 March.

read the text of the letter to justice minister Irwin Cotler at link:-
http://www.rsf.org/article.php3?id_article=12833

by Steven H Fri Mar 18, 2005 17:41

ARAN thank you ever so much for being the voice for animal rights here in ireland, you have got a tremendous amount of support around the country for your campaigns, well done!

by Ciaran. - Association Of Hunt Saboteurs Wed Mar 23, 2005 11:08 pagan_animal_liberation_front at hotmail dot com

Canadian Government says that fish stocks are vanishing? Maybe they should starting looking into how the fishing industry and also polution has destroyed the fish population. BAN FISHING and leave the seals alone!!!!



Canada says the seal population has exploded
Canada has given the go-ahead for what is expected to be one of the biggest seal hunts in the country for decades.

The government says the hunt is now more humane and that more than 300,000 seals can be killed this year.

The seal population is reaching record levels as commercial fish stocks are vanishing, the authorities say.

Animal rights campaigners, who say the hunt is cruel, have called for a boycott of Canadian seafood before the hunt which is due to start on 29 March.

The two-month hunt takes place on ice floes off the Atlantic coast where the seals give birth.

The Department of Fisheries and Oceans said in a statement Canada's seal population was healthy and abundant.

"The harp seal herd - the most important seal herd for this industry - is estimated at around five million animals, nearly the highest level ever recorded, and almost triple what it was in the 1970s."

Large-scale hunting will be allowed to continue until the number falls to under four million.

One official told the AFP news agency: "We have to do our job responsibly. We are looking at the middle ground, taking into account conservation and the economic needs of the region."

But anti-hunt activists, who say many animals are skinned alive and die in agony, say they will press ahead with the boycott.

"I think that they [the Canadian government] are feeling the heat... they can see the really serious implication of going ahead with the hunt this year," said Pat Ragan of the Humane Society of the United States.

"We're going to be encouraging consumers to enter into dialogue with their grocery stores and their restaurants and say 'Please don't serve Canadian seafood' or 'I won't buy Canadian seafood until this hunt is over'," she told Reuters news agency.

The seal hunt in Newfoundland and Labrador went into decline some 25 years ago, after images of hunters clubbing infant seals horrified TV viewers across the world.

by redjade Fri Mar 25, 2005 16:56

Canada Begins Annual Seal Cull Amid Call to Boycott its Seafood
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0324-01.htm

Published on Thursday, March 24, 2005 by the Independent/UK

The snow and ice of eastern Canada is set to turn red with blood once again as hunters prepare to embark on an operation to club or shoot up to 320,000 young seals.

For the third year in a row, hunters will take to the floes and islands around Quebec's Îles de la Madeleine in the Gulf of St Lawrence. The hunt starts on Tuesday and then moves east to the ice floes of Newfoundland.

Animal rights campaigners have begun a boycott of Canadian seafood products and this year's hunt is set to be as controversial as before. The Canadian government has hit back with an unusually strong attack on activists, accusing them of spreading "misleading rhetoric".

"[They issue] sensational images that tell a selective, biased and often false story," said the Fisheries Minister, Geoff Regan. "It is a real disgrace to have such negative light being cast on the Canadian men and women of this industry. These carefully orchestrated campaigns twist the facts of the seal hunt for the benefit of a few extremely powerful and well-funded organizations."

by Amanda K - ARAN Mon Mar 28, 2005 14:11

Many thanks to everyone who supprted ARAN's third annual seal hunt demo outside the Canadian Embassy. Between 12pm-2pm almost 50 people came along.

If you want to join ARAN for upcoming peaceful, professional campaigns and events please email us today

[email protected]

For Animal Rights

Animal Rights Action Network (ARAN)
"Ireland's National Animal Rights Group"

by Greeen Peas Wed Mar 30, 2005 13:16

The annual Canadian harp-seal cull has been contentious since the sixties. In fact, it caused the first major rift in the organisation Greenpeace. One of its founder members went to protest the killings but came back moved by the plight of the Inuit peoples who depend on the annual trade in pelts for survival.

This isn't hunting for sport or greed. This is hunting for survival and the annual protests at the cull, while valid, especially at the sheer numbers of pups killed, is a bit naive in that it is usually affluent middle-class Westeners telling [yet again] traditional peoples how they should survive in the wilderness.

This issue isn't as straightforward or as black & white as it at first appears. Yes, if you feel strongly about animal rights in general, then not only would you be opposed to seal-culling, you would also be concerned about all animal-use, and this is merely reflective of the wider issue of animal slaughter.

If it's an issue of protecting endangered species, then it's less simple. The harp-seal is not endangered and the annual seal-cull by the local tribes goes back probably thousands of years. These days it is on a much larger scale because the seals are not killed for the carcass to be used locally but for the pup-pelts to be used in the fashion industry. However, the tribes can provide a lot more for their families by selling the pelts.

That said however, the Canadian government has been negligent in the proper management of this cull and the harp-seal could face dangerous levels of culling.

http://www.greenpeace.org/international_en/news/details?item_id=778968

Good luck with the protest but remember that this issue is more complicated than a simple Good vs Evil tale.

by Ciaran Long - Alliance For Animal Rights Thu Mar 31, 2005 16:21 pagan_animal_liberation_front at hotmail dot com

A Gale is Raging, Sealing Vessels are Sinking, and the Seals are Safe for
Today at Least

Report from Captain Paul Watson

March 30th, 2005

2000 Hours Atlantic Standard Time

1600 Hours Pacific Standard Time


Position: 47 Degrees 03 Minutes 58 Seconds North

61 Degrees 35 Minutes 13 Seconds West

13 Miles South of the Magdalen Islands

The Farley Mowat is in the middle of a hellish raging early spring storm, but we're not complaining. This weather has been an incredible salvation to the harp seal pups. Relatively few were slaughtered today. Yesterday, more than 15,000 seals were killed.

The Farley Mowat has been pushed seven miles to the south since Noon. We are locked into the ice and so are most of the sealing ships.

But whereas the Farley Mowat, a strong North Sea Norwegian-built trawler is sitting as snug as bug in a rug, the sealing vessels are getting an ass kicking from the gale.

The sealing vessel Sandy Beach has been abandoned and is drifting some 30 miles north of the Magdalen Islands. Her crew were airlifted by a Coast Guard helicopter.

The sealing vessel Yankee Point has been abandoned, is listing heavily in the ice, and will most likely sink. The crew were rescued by another sealing vessel the Cooper Island. The Cooper Island is now listing heavily and has forty sealers on board. The ice breaker Earl Grey is en route to rescue them.

The sealing vessel Horizon I was under tow by the Coast Guard ship Amundsen when the tow line broke and the vessel has been reported abandoned although
this is not confirmed.

The sealing vessel Jean Mathieu has issued a call for help. There were two unknown mayday distress signals issued from unidentified sealing vessels. Some sealing vessels have reported having their bridge windows blown in and their electronics damaged.

The three Canadian Coast Guard icebreakers in the Gulf, the Edward Cornwallis, the Amundsen and the Earl Grey have been running rescue missions to assist distressed sealing vessels all day. Some of the sealers have managed to scurry back to the safety of the harbour at Cap aux Meule in the Magdalen Islands. The Coast Guard have indicated that many of their crew are
exhausted but the calls keep coming in.

The Canadian government has irresponsibly opened up this seal slaughter to every greedy fishermen with a boat. Few of these vessels have any business
being in the ice and cannot navigate the thick floes without assistance from the Coast Guard. Thus we have a hundred or so sealing vessels in treacherous
ice conditions in a raging gale and the Canadian Coast Guard is not prepared to assist them all. To make matters worse, two of the ice breakers spent hours shadowing the Farley Mowat to ensure that we did not take any photographs of the seal killing.

Late in the afternoon, an officer with the Quebec Provincial Police telephoned me to say that we needed a permit to approach a half a nautical mile to a sealer. I answered that we had all applied for the permits but the
Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) would only issue the permits in the Magdalen Islands, the one place that the crew of the Farley Mowat could not safely go. The officer said he understood and said that the QPP had the authority within twelve miles of the Magdalens and that we had permission to approach within a half a nautical mile of a sealer on the condition that the crew would not leave the vessel. The problem is that I requested that this permission be given in writing or by e-mail and so far I have not received any such permission.

And so we await tomorrow with hopes that the storm will not abate and that Mother Nature's fury will intensify and bring misery and misfortune to all those who have so ruthlessly delivered cruelty and death to so many seals.
When I hear the howl of the winds through our rigging and I feel the shiver of the wind's force vibrating through the ship's hull, I am hearing the Banshee screaming of an enraged spirit of nature. The freezing rain is washing the blood of yesterday's carnage from the ice leaving the haunting wretched and skinned bodies of fifteen thousand innocent creatures staring vacantly towards the dark hovering clouds overhead.

We are all under those black clouds this evening - seals, sealers, seal defenders, and government sealer protectors. The seals are safe within the furies and we are comfortable. The Coast Guard are busy rescuing their beloved seal killers and the sealers are gloriously miserable and we are happy for that. They don't have our sympathies for we saw what they did and we witnessed their insensitivity, their viciousness, their greed and their sadistic delight in killing and destroying such beautiful and innocent beings.

So bring it on Mother Nature - intensify the winds, throw the freezing rain in our faces, put enough pressure on the ice to crack and fracture every sealer's hull and bury them under the dark shroud of the sea in just retribution for the evil they unleashed on the ice yesterday.

The unspeakable horror of their deeds must be punished, if not by Canada then by Nature.

And there is a religious element to this. The baby seal was used by the legendary Labrador missionary Sir Wilfred Grenfell to convey the idea of the Lamb of God to the Inuit. The baby harp seal was the ideal replacement for an animal that the Inuit had never seen. They knew what Grenfell was referring to because the beauty and the innocence of the seal pup speaks for itself. The Inuit word for the baby seal is kotik and that is the same word
they use for the Lamb of God.

Yesterday, the sealers made the floes run red with torrents of blood from the Lamb of God. And tonight they lament about the storm and some are seeing their ill-gotten profits sink to the bottom of the sea. Mother Mary and Mother Gaia are both crying this night

by Ciaran Long - Alliance For Animal Rights Fri Apr 01, 2005 13:10 pagan_animal_liberation_front at hotmail dot com

Farley Mowat Update by Captain Paul Watson

1520 Hours AST

The Farley Mowat is under attack.

11 crewmembers have been arrested by the Mounted Police for taking pictures of sealers. They were arrested after 8 sealers physically assaulted 7 Sea Shepherd crewmembers on the ice with hak-a-piks and clubs.

The sealers were from the sealing ship the Brady Mariner out of Newfoundland.

The Canadian Coast Guard ship on the scene is the Amundsen.

The 11 Crew In Custody are:

Colin Biroc - American
Andre Casanave - American
Alex Cornelissen - Dutch
Laura Dakin - Australian
Ian Fritz - American
Ryan Goyette - American
Peter Hammarstedt - Swedish
Matthew Schwartz - American
Lisa Shalom - Canadian - assaulted
Megan Southern - American
Jerry Vlasak - American - assaulted



Other Crew Assaulted:

Jon Batchlor - American - assaulted
Lisa Moises - German - assaulted
Ian Robichaud - American - assaulted
Jonny Vasic - American - assaulted

Lisa Moises and Ian Robichaud barely made it back to the Farley Mowat. They watched as the massive red hull of the Coast Guard Icebreaker Amundsen bore quickly down on them in an attempt to cut them off. They could see chunks of ice flying out from the bow of the ice breaker but they kept focused on the Farley Mowat and managed to make it across.

Behind them Jonny Vasic and Jon Batchelor raced to cross the ice before the Amundsen could cut them off. Jonny saw the hull looming above him and felt the ice tremble as a jagged cut slithered before the bow and opened up. He could see the dark black water widening as he jumped and made it across, relieved to see that Jon Batchelor had done the same. Both of them raced towards the Farley Mowat.

Behind them Alex Cornelissen and Lisa Shalom were not so lucky. They were cut off and unable to cross the treacherous lead that the Amundsen had opened up.

They saw helicopters approaching and police officers debarking the Ice breaker, their hands on their guns approaching them.