Canada Unveils Annual Seal Hunt, Blasts Activists
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by David Ljunggren Reuters March 23, 2005
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OTTAWA — Canada said
Tuesday it would allow 320,000 young seals to be killed this year
and lashed out at activists who promise to boycott Canadian seafood
products in a bid to stop the hunt.
Ottawa says the cull is
needed to control a healthy seal population. But pictures of hunters
clubbing defenseless animals to death has turned the event into an
annual public relations nightmare for the government.
The
two-month hunt, which this year starts March 29, takes place on ice
floes off the Atlantic coast where the seals give birth. Canada says
the hunt is humane, but animal rights groups insist many animals are
skinned alive and die in agony.
Fisheries Minister Geoff
Regan said the activists were issuing "misleading rhetoric and
sensational images that tell a selective, biased and often false
story" about the hunt.
"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," he said in a statement.
Officials say the population of harp seals is now five
million animals, triple what it was in the 1970s, and it wants the
number reduced to 3.8 million.
Ottawa says the cull protects
depleted fish stocks and provides jobs in the economically depressed
eastern province of Newfoundland. The province's cod fishery
collapsed a decade ago and some fishermen says seals were partly to
blame.
Anti-hunt activists, who last week held protests in
50 cities across the world, said they would press ahead with calls
for a boycott of Canadian seafood.
The Canadian fishing
industry exports around C$3 billion ($2.5 billion) a year to the
United States while the seal hunt generates just C$16.5 million a
year, mostly from the sale of the pelts.
"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.
Ragan told Reuters the campaign would target restaurant
chains such as Red Lobster -- a unit of Darden Restaurants Inc. --
which buy Canadian seafood.
"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.
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Source: Reuters
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