Stop the butchery!

Canada               UK               USA

Greed fuels the over-fishing of our oceans that results in consequences more far reaching than many consider. Yet we continue to allow entire regions to further assault our struggling ecological balance with their refusal to address the issue, instead placing all – or at least significant – blame on other species in that ecological web.

Rather than address over-fishing, toxic elements affecting our oceans, and respecting the need for all species in the ecosystem, we allow Canada, for example, to excuse brutally cruel seal hunts that support the fur trade.

Thousands of seals are suffer painful and lingering deaths each year in Canada. A harp seal can be killed when about two weeks old, and the seal hunt occurs in the spring when young are being born. About 80% of the seals killed are beaten 12 days and 1 year old. Harp and hooded seals are two species most often commercially hunted. These cruel, ecologically damaging hunts are also carried out in Greenland, Namibia, Russia, Norway, and Sweden.

The seal pelts are used for fur and leather. Body parts are sold to Asian markets and some pieces sell for around $500 each.

In 2002, an international team of veterinary experts attended the hunt, observing sealers at work from the air and ground. Postmortems conducted found that up to 42% of the seals were likely skinned alive.

YouTube removed the video documenting these cruel and wasteful deaths, but Dodo has edited the original to be less graphic. WARNING: Even edited, this video is very disturbing!

Adding insult to injury – Thousands of seal pelts are wasted

November 2013 report

With the European Unions ban on seal products in 2009, demand for seal pelts dropped far below the several thousand killed each year – 6,000 in 2010 alone. Those pelts cannot even be sold.

Office of the Prime Minister   Fisheries and Oceans Canada
Justin Trudeau                                                            Hunter Tootoo
80 Wellington Street                                                  200 Kent Street, 13th Floor, Station 13228
Ottawa, ON K1A 0A2                                                 Ottawa Ontario K1A 0E6 Canada
Fax: 613-941-6900                                                      Fax: 613 993-1866

All this horror – and the seal meat is left to rot!

UK

As consumers, we unknowingly support the systematic extermination of essential species.

Many feel that seal extermination is not an issue affecting the UK due to the Marine (Scotland) Act of 2010 that requires seal hunters to be licensed and to report their kills. Although records show that seal deaths dropped (in 2014, 205 seals were reported killed) there is no way to now if all kills are reported. Per the linked Dodo report, Andy Ottaway of the Seal Protection Action Group compared this law to Canada’s completely ineffective marine mammal protection which allowed almost half a million harp, hooded, and gray seals to be brutally slaughtered in 2015 alone!

Read more:

Hundreds of U.K. Seals Killed Each Year In Secret, Brutal Cull

Seal cubs left to starve to death as the protected animals are being secretly shot along Britain’s coast

Sea Shepherd UK

 USA

The West Coast punishes seals for declining fish harvests rather than the 11 massive dams along the Columbia River in the USA. The Columbia River is the largest river in the Pacific Northwest.  Beginning in the Rocky Mountains of British Columbia, Canada (3 Canadian dams) and flowing northwest, then south through Washington state. The river forms part of the border between Washington and Oregon, where it empties into the Pacific Ocean. By volume, the Columbia is the fourth largest river in the US and has the greatest flow of any North American river draining into the Pacific.

“The Columbia River Basin, which includes parts of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, and British Columbia is an area larger than the country of France. The Northwest relies on hydropower for about two-thirds of its electricity,” says the Northwest Power and Conservation Council. Although river restoration is ongoing, the majority of hydropower dams are likely to remain. Learn more about dam removal and river restoration here…

Declining fish harvests have been shown to have multiple causes – dams preventing fish migration to spawn, detrimental effects of farm fish on their wild cousins, commercial and recreational fishing, toxins introduced into the ecosystem by manufacturing, plastic litter, and livestock production. The U.S. government permits fisheries on the Columbia River to kill up to 17% of the spawning salmon and describes this amount as having  “minor if at all measurable” impact on the fish.  Seals only consume between 1% – 4%! Logically and reasonably speaking, the seals’ impact on salmon is negligible.

However, along the coasts of California, Oregon, and Washington – seals pay the price for the fishing decline they did not cause. At many locations, are branded with the intention of killing them if they are observed eating salmon. When Sea Shepherd Dam Guardians reported the suffering caused by branding in 2013, Jessica Sall of Oregon Department of Fish & Wildlife said, ‘We’ve branded 1,400 sea lions and we’ve never seen any signs of distress. The fire seen on the backs of the sea lions in photos or the branding operation is from the sea lions’ fur burning under the hot iron, but the burning doesn’t hurt sea lions.’

Note the deep scarring from branding and consider whether you believe there is no suffering.