[news] The Seal Hunt: Canada's Cowardly Face

[Resist!ca]

Those who followed last year's hunt, which brought death to some 350,000 pups, will remember such typical scenes as one seal trying to escape as another is clubbed nearby; the creature makes it to water's edge but, too young to even swim, must wait there as the man with the club approaches. Other footage -- seen across the world, however unfairly, as the face of Canada -- showed sealers routinely dragging conscious pups across the ice with boat hooks, or shooting the seals and leaving them to suffer. Yet standing there, ankle deep in gore and innocent blood, the sealers just can't understand why anyone would object. And we're all supposed to feel sorry for them, these fine, upstanding fellows so unappreciated by the modern world. Mr. Efford, back when he led Newfoundland's fisheries department, demonstrated the mindset when he proposed to ban all cameras from the scene of the hunts -- as if the problem were public knowledge of the event, rather than the event itself.

URL: http://resist.ca/story/2005/1/5/20382/53983