Seal Slaughter Suspended for a Week

[flvegan]

The savage slaughter of the baby seals has been suspended for a week.

The sealers of the Quebec’s Magdalen Islands have returned home to bury three of the four sealers killed by Canadian Coast Guard incompetence. The fourth is still missing and is presumed dead.

Some of the Magdalen Island sealers will not be returning. According to the Canadian media: Wayne Dickson hasn't caught his quota of seals this season. But the 53-year-old says he no longer has the will to hunt after watching his friend's sealing vessel capsize while being towed by a Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker in the Gulf of St. Lawrence on the weekend. Dickson and his six-member crew managed to rescue two fishermen, but three other sealers drowned and a fourth is still missing after the damaged L'Acadien II fishing vessel overturned while being dragged over a large chunk of ice, about 70 kilometres north of Cape Breton Island. "I just don't have the heart for it - I don't think many of the guys are going back out," Dickson said Tuesday. "It is just too devastating."

Canadian Minister of Fisheries and Oceans has accused anti-slaughter organizations of exploiting the tragedy to underscore how unsafe sealing is, citing that the sealers are well aware of how dangerous their occupation is.

“We did not kill these men,” said Captain Paul Watson. “Canadian government incompetence and the political ambitions of Loyola Hearn killed them. Hearn allows hundreds of undersize, wooden and aluminum vessels into treacherous ice conditions and does not provide adequate Coast Guard protections and training. Those men died because they were in conditions they should not have been in and the Canadian government put them in that position.”

Canadian Fisheries Minister Loyola Hearn is attempting to discredit the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society with contradictory accusations. First he accuses Sea Shepherd of being a wealthy organization and then describes the Sea Shepherd ship Farley Mowat as an unsafe “decrepit rust bucket.”

The Farley Mowat is an ice class steel hulled 60 meter ship that has years of experience navigating ice conditions both in the Arctic and the Antarctic yet according to the Minister it is unsafe for our ship to be in the ice yet it is okay to send 12 meter fragile vessels into the same ice.

http://www.seashepherd.org/news/media_080402_1.html

My favorite part of the article (outside of the message):

Attempts to retrieve the video by helicopter failed when the Canadian Department of Transport grounded the helicopter from HSUS that was going to pick up the video.
The Sea Shepherd ship Farley Mowat is in the middle of very hostile territory, in the middle of dangerous ice conditions, unable to rely on the Canadian Coast Guard for assistance, under attack by that same Coast Guard, threatened by powerful Canadian politicians, threatened with physical assault from armed and angry seal killers.

I love that HSUS and SSCS are working together, at least somewhat. Honestly warms my heart.

[Annces]

1. I think HSUS likes Sea Shepherd

They also helped in the whale hunt, by telling the Japanese Whalers they would serve legal papers to them if they tried to dock in Australia last year, for illegally whaling in a Sanctuary.