Saturday, March 29, 2008

Stop the seal hunt!

Go here to help stop the Canadian seal hunt.

Every year, thousands of seals are brutally killed (the total allowed this year is 275,000!!!). Information from the Humane Society:

The 2007 Canadian seal hunt left more than 215,378 seals dead --
almost all of them were babies as young as 12 days . . . Seal hunting is an off-season activity for Canada's east coast commercial fishermen. They earn a small fraction of their incomes from selling seal skins to the fur industry: only a reported $17.5 million (Canadian) annually, compared to the nearly $3 billion taken in by the Canadian fishing industry from seafood exports to the United States. The connection between the commercial fishing industry and the seal hunt gives consumers all over the world the power to end the cruel slaughter of seals.
(The link at the start of this post will let you take action.)

As this article explains, "Hunters will be required to sever the arteries under a seal's flippers." This is supposed to be a more humane approach to make sure the seals are dead before they skin them, because the hunters didn't bother with that in the past. They skinned many alive!

So the humane approach is going to be to club these defenseless animals and then cut them open to let them bleed out? How humane!

"Fishermen sell seal pelts mostly to the fashion industry in Norway, Russia and China, as well as blubber for oil, earning about $78 for each seal."

Pelts? So this is still killing for fashion. And oil from blubber? How is any of this defensible?

How long will it take until this savagery stops?

6 comments:

dennis said...

Dennis wonders: when will all these hunter/people realize animals have souls?

Jess said...

Dennis: I don't get it, either. This isn't killing to eat/survive. This is driven purely by greed, and that's just wrong!

Rebel Yankee said...

Meh. In this day and age, we hardly need to kill to survive. But we keep on doing it.

dantallion said...

Yeah - as proud of I am of a lot of what we are as a nation, the hunt is a serious blight. The fact is, most Canadians (ie: Non-east coast-maritimers) are very much against the seal-hunt. But because the maritimes fishing economy has been decimated by a federal moratorium on cod fishing due to foreign over-fishing, the Canadian government has been too cowardly to put a stop to it for fear of losing votes.

Jess said...

Eric: True.

Dan: I'm proud of my country, too, but we're certainly not perfect. All any of us can do is work to make things better, wherever we are.

A DC said...

I've always been completely against the seal hunts. And hunting in general. Such a useless thing to do....