Poor Seals

[Flattieman]

Sad story...

"Canadian hunters shoot and club seals

Sunday Mar 26 06:53 AEDT

Canadian hunters started shooting and clubbing harp seal pups at the start of an annual hunt that is the focus of a tech-savvy protest by animal rights groups.

This year, 325,000 young seals will be killed on the ice floes off the East Coast, where the animals gather.

Hunters in boats shot the seals as they lay on small ice floes and then dashed over to the bodies in hopes of retrieving them before they sank.

At one point a hunter, frustrated at the activists' presence, picked up the bloody carcass of a skinned seal and threw it at a boat full of protesters and journalists. It hit the boat and sank.

The hunt started slowly because unusually warm weather means the ice is breaking up, scattering the seals over a larger area than usual.

"The ice is not full of seals all over the place. They are very spread out," said Roger Simon of Canada's federal fisheries ministry, which oversees the hunt.

There were no reports of clashes between the hunters and activists, who say the hunt is inhumane and should be banned. A small group of activists has chartered a boat that is following the hunt, and has put film of the killings on their websites.

Celebrities such as former French film star Brigitte Bardot and ex-Beatle Paul McCartney called on Ottawa this week to stop the hunt.

Once the animals are killed, they are skinned and taken into the hunter's boats. The pelt is used to make coats while the rest of the carcass is usually left behind.

Rebecca Aldworth of the Humane Society of the US said the poor quality of the ice meant her team had found far fewer seals than usual.

"The few surviving baby seals we've watched for the last several days are being killed as Canada's gruesome seal hunt begins again," she said.

"Harp seals now face a double threat to their survival - the impacts of climate change and historic high levels of commercial hunting."

Canada says the hunt gives the local economy a crucial boost and helps keep a harp seal population of almost 6 million animals in check.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper said Canada was behaving responsibly and would enforce rules ensuring that the seals were killed humanely.

"Unfortunately here, we're to some degree the victim of a bit of an international propaganda campaign," he said yesterday.

Aldworth repeated calls for an international boycott of Canadian seafood to protest what she said was "incredible cruelty at the hunt, including dragging conscious seals across the ice with boathooks, shooting seals and leaving them to suffer in agony and skinning seals alive".

The first part of the hunt, which takes place near the Magdalen Islands in the Gulf of St Lawrence, usually takes about 10 to 12 days to complete and this year will account for just over 90,000 seals.

The second and larger stage, off the coast of Newfoundland, starts on April 4.

"We are absolutely committed to making sure this is the last slaughter of baby seals in Canada anyone will ever have to witness," McCartney said yesterday.

©AAP 2006"

Flattieman

[robthefisherman]

Pretty sad stuff

http://www.harpseals.org/

[Flattieman]

Good post, good food for thought.

for what you said.

Flattieman.

[kikila]

The way that the seals are culled is not pretty and perhaps there is a more humane way of doing so because beating an animal to death is not very humane but if seal numbers are left unchecked they will eat their available food resource with in a couple of years then starve which is not pretty either.

[Tony Soprano]

I have to agree with kikila...

Without being the most humane practice I can see where they're coming from...

And at a base level, is it really any different to belting a fish over the head with a priest?

Just because they're seen to be 'cute' by a lot of people means there's a lot of sympathy for them...

Out of curiousity, which of you who think this practice is terrible eats meat, and of those, who has been to an abbatoir and seen how cattle are dispatched?

There's a lot of things us humans do which is pretty nasty but there is a reason for all of it, pretty or not...

[Flattieman]

I have seen cattle killed - but not with a club, I don't think Egyptian slaughter houses are a positive thing.... just as the culling of roos " killing fields" are ethical - I have seen mass slaughter and waste - just like this "cute" seal "cull" .

You raise a good point about fishing - I do use a priest and the knife - and I realise my "sport" is a blood sport where pain is inflicted on the fish. I don't deny this or ignore it.

So I kill what i can eat as cleanly and quickly as possible. I realise while we can practise fishing and hunting I am going to participate. ( and I prey we all fight to keep it going ) .

To be honest don't know heaps about the practise and the arguements - if we did "that" to joeys and threw away the meat for their skin I can imagine we would have big international protest on our hands. ( bigger than 2 dingos doing it in the Indo paper )

I must say I apprecaite not having seals ( in numbers more than 2 ) in Pittwater/broken bay as they are a pain in the ass. Still I accept they are part of the original plan and system.

I am looking forward to fishing without them this weekend -

salute

Very well conveyed, Haraka. I agree on many accounts.

Flattieman.

[Tony Soprano]

Fair points Haraka...

But do you believe that sending a couple of thousand volts into a cow's brain and paralysing it completely before stringing it up by the hind legs and slitting its throat is better than hitting a baby seal with a club or shooting it?

To me the two things are no different.

I'm sure the seal meat wouldn't go to waste completely, sharks would be cleaning up anything left behind anyway I would imagine, continuing the cycle...

[trev]

I am not sure of all the reasons for the seal slaughter, I have seen Roo numbers increase out west on Relatives farms and been involved in legal culls to reduce numbers. Whilst I haven't been for some years I used to love hunting Roos, Foxes and bunnies. I love to catch and eat fresh fish...

And to quote a statement I heard the other day

"I didn't fight my way to the top of the food chain to be a bloody vegetarian!"

Cheers

Trev

[Outnumbered]

whilst i feel badly for the cute and cuddly baby fur seals i can't help but wonder if people would feel the same if cow's, sheep and chickens etc. were slautered in the wild.

i personally think that the animal lib's kick up a stink because they're cute and that it's out in the open.

when ever i am confronted by a rabid vegie i throw a "proven scientific fact" at them that states:

"a cucumber has been proven to have more live nerve ending's than a cow so therefore must feel pain"

whislt that is probably total BS it shuts them up long enough for me to enjoy my steak

[Big-Pete]

I don't agree totally with the fur trade, but man has been culling seals for over one hundred plus years and a few years I can not remember how long ago it was culling was missed/stopped for one season and the impact of the extra seals was devestating to the fish stocks. So if it were stopped the seals would eat themselves into problems very quickly.

Clubbing of seals is the safest way and the most humane way of dispatching the seals that is available, shooting is too dangeous due to ricocheting bullets and missed judged distances over the ice.

If the practice is to be stopped it must be done slowly over time to allow a new balance to be established.

Point of interest the seals fur we use for dubbing is from the baby seals as they molt the hair is blown along the shore where the Inuit Indians collect it and on sell it.

Big-Pete

[clutch]

I was interested to read this today, a little more info on the Canadian Harp Seal after much discussion a month ago.

I stayed well clear of the topic as I speent 20 years there.....family still there....even one of my passports is from there

...but thought this was interesting......

Arctic Harp Seals Show Up on U.S. Beaches Tue May 16, 1:24 PM ET

OCEAN CITY, Md. - Canadian snowbirds aren't the only northern tourists you might meet at the beach this summer.

ADVERTISEMENT

An increasing number of young harp seals are straying from their northern breeding grounds and showing up on U.S. beaches, biologists say. Federal researchers say 297 harp seals were reported on beaches from Virginia to Maine last year, almost double the 152 reported in 1995.

The booming arctic harp seal population in Canada, spurred by a hunting ban, and dwindling food sources such as cod are among the reasons being cited.

"This is interesting and weird," said John Hocevar, a marine biologist with Greenpeace. "There has definitely been a healthy rebound in their numbers."

Greenpeace was among the groups that opposed hunting of baby harp seals, which are valued for their lush white fur. The seals that are showing up on Maryland beaches are usually about a year old and have already begun turning gray. Adult harp seals, named because of a harp-shaped marking on their backs, are gray with black faces, reaching maturity in four to six years, weighing about 300 pounds and measuring about six feet.

Six harp seals have been sighted on Maryland beaches over the past 18 months, according to the stranded marine mammal team at the National Aquarium in Baltimore.

Gordon Waring, a biologist in Woods Hole, Mass., with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said the hunting ban has led to a population boom that is pushing the species farther south.

"The population is growing, with an estimated 5.5 million today," Waring told The (Baltimore) Sun.

While the population center is in Canadian waters, "it's not surprising, with the large number of harp seals, that some of them are now showing up in U.S. waters."

Commercial fishing of cod and other fish in the North Atlantic may have also driven the seals further south in search of food, said Jennifer Dittmar, a marine biologist with the National Aquarium.

Hocevar said harp seals still face an uncertain future, in part because of overfishing. In 2000, Canada allowed seal hunting again, permitting up to 400,000 young seals a year with gray coats to be taken.

Dittmar said the most recent stranding in the Chesapeake region was Feb. 8 when a sick harp seal was found in Bethany Beach, Del.

"It was observed eating sand," Dittmar said. "The seal had drainage from its eyes and nose and it was underweight."

The year-old female was taken to the National Aquarium in Baltimore, where it was given antibiotics to treat a mild case of pneumonia and fed herring and capelin. After gaining 25 pounds, the seal was released on April 6 near Ocean City.

Why seals like that one are showing up is not clear, but marine biologists say it's not for mating. Floating ice and much colder temperatures are needed for breeding.

The seals first venture off on their own at about a year old and have to swim more than a thousand miles to rejoin their colonies in Canada, Dittmar said.