Struck and Lost

Another harp seal pup slaughter begins again.
Over 338,000 harp, hooded and grey seals will be slaughtered this year per Canada's quota.
harp seal 7 by ~xXxWTFxXx
BREAKING NEW UPDATE!
The first harp seal has been killed:

In the same week that Russia annouced an end to the hunting of seals under a year old, the Canadian goverment released today that they will allow for the slaughter of 280,000 harp seal pups this year.

This is outrageous. This quota is completely indefensible. It’s not supported by markets, it’s not supported by the DFO’s own management plan, and it’s certainly not going to be supported by the majority of Canadians.

For the past two years we’ve seen saturated markets for seal fur, and pelt prices are now the lowest in recent memory. If this is a market-based hunt, as the government claims, the quota for this year should be zero.

The federal government’s determination to ignore reality on this issue is totally irrational. There are no markets for seal products, and with a potential European-wide ban on the horizon, no signs that the economic outlook is going to improve anytime soon. While our politicians trip over themselves to support commercial sealing, our taxes are being wasted on bailing out an anachronistic, dangerous, dead-end industry.

How ironic that two days after Russia announced an end to its commercial harp seal hunt, Canada is condemning one-third of the pups born here to a cruel and unnecessary death. Our government is insistent on keeping Canada stuck in the dark ages. Canadians would be much better served by a government that will stop playing politics, stop wasting our taxes, and start investing in alternative, economically viable employment opportunities.
Canada’s commercial seal hunt will be under intense scrutiny this year, as the European Union considers banning the trade in seal products.
You can help keep the pressure on the Canadian government by taking action now on www.stopthesealhunt.org


The 280K quota only includes harp seals and does not include many that are struck and lost like this one from last year's seal slaughter.


Animal-welfare group unable to observe start of Canadian seal hunt
Fink explained that the sealers are very competitive, and basically race against each other. “This is one of the biggest problems with the hunt,” she said. “What we see is seals being stunned with a hakapick—bang bang bang. The first seal will start to regain consciousness because it wasn’t properly killed. It wasn’t properly checked for unconsciousness. It wasn’t properly bled out to make sure that it wasn’t going to come back to life.”


Here's the video:



TORONTO — Canada's annual seal hunt started Monday, under pressure from a possible European Union ban on imported seal products.

The world's largest marine mammal hunt was called "inherently inhumane" earlier this month by a European Parliament committee that endorsed the bill to ban the import of seal products to the 27-member union....

Is that a skinned baby seal?

Kumi via SugarCut

I’d sure like to know the story behind this image. Perhaps those gloves are made of seal skin and fur.

Written in baby seal blood: "F@ck Off"

This seal was struck by the hunter and wounded before it escaped into the water so it is not included in Canada's quota of 275,000 seals this year.


On Monday the IFAW team continued to document Canada's commercial seal hunt off the east coast of Cape Breton. We saw four boats; two medium size boats and two small skiffs, along with the Coast Guard vessel. The boats were moving through the ice pans searching for the young pups. Although this is my seventh year documenting Canada's commercial seal hunt, one can never be completely prepared for the cruelty that we witness. We documented sealers both shooting seals from their boats and clubbing them on the ice.

I saw animals being shot from boats and injured; these young seals were not killed quickly or humanely like the Canadian government claims they are. One animal was crawling around on the ice bleeding for over a minute before the boat arrived and a sealer jumped down onto the ice pan to kill it with a club. It never ceases to amaze me that sealers see a seal crawling around on the ice suffering, yet they don't act quickly and shoot the animal again to put it out of it's misery.

IFAW documents the seal hunt for a few days a year and we can only be filming one boat at time. Yet every year we see animals being shot or clubbed and left to suffer. We see animals hooked and skinned alive, as we did yesterday. The most striking image from yesterday's footage involved a seal that was injured and then hooked in the face and dragged back to the boat. We were moving between boats and came across a sealer on the ice with what appeared to be a dead seal. He started writing in the snow with a bloody finger; the message was "F@ck Off".

As we were circling to get a better shot of his message to us, the seal that was on the ice behind him, tried to sit up! This was clearly not swimming reflex, this animal was still conscious. The sealer did not respond by taking action to quickly kill the seal as required by the Marine Mammal Regulations, instead he hooked it in the face and then proceeded to drag the animal across the ice and onto the boat, still alive. What we document out here is unacceptable and the world needs to see what only a few people have the ability to view in person. IFAW is here to document the hunt so that the world can see that this hunt is inherently cruel and is not monitored or enforced like the government claims.
More from IFAW.org

This seal was struck by the hunter and wounded before it escaped into the water. This is known as seal that has been struck and lost.

The following are eye-witness accounts from crewmembers onboard the Farley Mowat. The very witnessing of these events is considered illegal by the Canadian government.

We encountered the sealing vessel the Cathy Erlene, registered to Sydney NS. Upon approach we saw two small aluminum boats carrying two men each darting from ice floe to ice floe searching for baby seals. It seemed they had a system. The barbarians on the Cathy Erlene were cruising through the ice searching for the few seal pups there were. They carried on their disgusting massacre carelessly firing upon the unsuspecting babies, their only goal to find and maim the infants. We witnessed two helpless victims, meters from the ship writhing in agony, hot blood spilling onto the ice and heard their cries as they continued to suffer for a good long time awaiting the small boats to arrive and fulfill their doom. Stepping onto the ice the babies, still alive turn their heads to the approaching man with a club. There is nothing humane about this massacre. What I saw today I will never forget, their cries will fill my thoughts and torture my soul. I can say I am truly embarrassed to be of the same race as these cowards and ashamed to be a Canadian today.
-Shannon Mann, Canada

Nothing prepared me for this, no video or previous encounter with the sealers on the ice. I watched in horror and disgust as two murderers clammered from their small boat, club in hand, and smashed in the skull of a baby harp seal. For an hour or so my memories are fuzzy with blood, abuse and worst of all the cries of seals as they are brutally killed. We will do whatever we can to expose this unnecessary, disgusting slaughter of life. Canada can not continue to censor its dirty secret any longer.
- Laura Dakin UK

First sight of human life on the ice I see two men lifting a seal impaled through the neck onto a sealing boat... the seal was still moving. There was lots of ice covered with blood everywhere. There was a larger boat that the smaller boats were dropping off the seals to be skinned, one of the crew of the boat got up to wave smuggly at us. They were skinning them and throwing the seal carcasses back overboard. They call it a seal hunt but I don't think walking up to a stationary seal and smashing its head in is hunting, it is an act of pure cruelty. No wonder they don't want the rest of the world to see what is happening.
- Daniel Bishop, England

It is untrue to say that killing these seals is being done humanely. Today we have seen sealers shooting the baby seals to wound them so they can't flee, beating them with wooden clubs then killing them by cutting thearteries under their flippers. The seals die slowly and in pain. It is a horrible thing to see.
- Dr Merryn Redenbach, Australia

When I woke this morning I looked through the port hole and saw red patches of blood on the ice and I knew the seal hunt had begun. On the deck I immediately saw a small boat and two men who stopped on a little piece of ice in order to slaughter an innocent baby harp seal. Actually there were two small boats and one sealing ship. The hunters carried a hakapik and bashed the seal's head. Some of the seals were still alive when they were delivered back to the sealing ship where they were finally skinned.
- Anne Fourier, France

I would like to post a happy fishnet friday post, but...

First kills of 2008.

Making matters worse Open Season on Wolves in Wyoming starts today: Today, the decision by the Bush administration to remove the Northern Rockies gray wolf from the list of species protected under the Endangered Species Act goes into effect.

Video and details on CNN via Wagga.

Baby seals have less than 1 day left to live

Help stop this insanity.
Boycott Canadian seafood.
Boycott Red Lobster.

Baby seal slaughter begins in less than 2 days

Who could possibly purchase fur clothing made out of these little guys killed so brutally?
Often they are skinned before they are dead despite what the Canadian government says.


Do you want to support thugs like this? If not, sign the pledge.





The seal hunt survives only because of subsidies doled out to the sealing industry by the government of Canada. It has become a glorified welfare scheme where in return for killing seals for a few weeks the sealers can qualify for unemployment insurance for the rest of the year.

“They say it’s part of their culture,” said Captain Watson, president and founder of Sea Shepherd who himself grew up in an Eastern fishing village in the Canadian province of New Brunswick. “It’s a culture based on the cruel clubbing of baby seals for a few weeks each year and drinking Canadian Club and beer the rest of the year. It’s a culture that any Maritimer with half a brain abandoned generations ago.”



It looks like this skinhead asshole spends a lot of time on his ass drinking beer.
Boycott Canada.

Seal Hunt Starts in Less than 3 Days

These pups may soon be clubbed to death.


Take action to stop Canada's cruel seal hunt.
Boycott Canadian seafood.

More Humane Baby Seal Slaughter?

A harp seal lies on the ice as a sealing boat positions itself for the start of the commercial seal hunt.


More humane seal hunt takes to ice: The key element will be for hunters to palpitate the seal's skull to gauge whether it is unconscious or whether its head has been fatally crushed before proceeding with bleeding out or skinning the animals. If the seal is still alert, hunters will have to cut the main artery to ensure imminent death.
...
"They're not going to require immediate testing for unconsciousness," said Rebecca Aldworth, director of Canadian Wildlife Issues for the Humane Society of the United States, a leading opponent of the seal hunt.

"They're shooting from boats, at moving seals, from moving vessels, often at a distance of 50 to 60 metres. Even if you were able to stun that animal with one gunshot, it would take a significant amount of time to reach that animal and test for unconsciousness ... and that's done by impaling the animal through the jaw with a hook and lifting it on to the boat. That does not fit with internationally accepted standards for a humane death."

Canada says 275,000 seals can be killed this year:
OTTAWA, March 10 (Reuters) - Hunters will be allowed to kill 275,000 young harp seals on the ice floes off eastern Canada this year, the government said on Monday, a number that animal rights activists said was totally unsustainable.

The quota is slightly more than last year's 270,000, when ice conditions were poor, but considerably below the 335,000 set in 2006.

Phil Jenkins, a spokesman for the Fisheries and Oceans Department, dismissed suggestions that the harp seal herd was in danger of shrinking.

"The seal herd is healthy and abundant right now at about 5.5 million animals. We want to see it continue to be healthy and so over the years we have brought back the total allowable catch," he said.

The animals are either shot or clubbed to death in a hunt that takes place in March and April each year. The furs are turned into clothes and there is a growing market for seal oil, which is rich in omega 3 fatty acids.

Activists complain the hunt is cruel and say they often catch sealers killing animals in an inhumane way. Ottawa says that from this year hunters will be obliged to take extra steps to ensure the seals die humanely.

Sheryl Fink of the International Fund for Animal Welfare said she was stunned at the quota, which she described as unsustainable.

"There is absolutely no way this increase in quota can possibly be justified," she said in a statement.

"It's a national embarrassment ... is killing baby seals really what Canadians want to be known for?

The government's official plan calls for the herd to be kept at 4.1 million animals or above.

"We have a conservative approach to dealing with this herd ... 275,000 is at a level where we think we are not anywhere near in danger of bringing it down to 4.1 million," said Jenkins. The hunt is set to start in the second half of March.

Activists, who since 2005 have been urging U.S. restaurant chains to boycott Canadian seafood until the seal hunt is stopped, say they are optimistic the European Union will soon impose a ban on the import of all seal products from Canada.

"The seal hunt is an economic mainstay for numerous rural communities in Atlantic Canada, Quebec and the North. It's with these people in mind we make decisions based on science," said federal Fisheries Minister Loyola Hearn.

Activists say the minority Conservative government is in fact subsidizing the hunt in a bid to gain votes in Eastern Canada at the next federal election, which is set for October 2009.

"We believe this quota is reckless and it's far more about conserving votes than it is about conserving seals, said Rebecca Aldworth of the Humane Society of the United States. (Reporting by David Ljunggren; editing by Rob Wilson)

harp seal 1 by ~xXxWTFxXx

“Quite frankly, I’m stunned.” Said Sheryl Fink, a senior researcher with the International Fund for Animal Welfare - IFAW. “There is absolutely no way this increase in quota can possibly be justified. The science doesn’t support it, the markets can’t support it, and the Canadian public won’t support it.”

Scientists from the DFO have acknowledged that the harp seal population is in decline, and have warned that a significant reduction in the Total Allowable Catch will be necessary in order to reach the Canadian government’s management objectives.

“If nothing else, today’s announcement will solidify the recent international criticism of Canada as a country with a ‘manifest disregard for science’.” said Fink