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Canada to kill up to 50,000 seal pups as Winter Olympics begin10/02/2010 17:36:23
50,000 seals to be culled in 2010 in Canada. Credit IFAW February 2010. With international focus on Canada as the 2010 Winter Olympic Games begin this week, the Canadian government has announced the planned killing of as many as 50,000 grey seal pups on its east coast. 75% Grey seal pups to be slaughtered Three out of every four grey seal pups born this year have been marked for death. On Hay Island, part of the protected Scaterie Island Wilderness Area, over 80% of this year's pups may be killed. Sheryl Fink, Senior Researcher with International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), said: "This federally funded extermination programme targets the most helpless of creatures for political purposes. There are no commercial or conservation reasons for this slaughter to proceed. With the few dying markets for seal products disappearing, and no evidence that killing seals will help fish stocks, this is nothing more than a pathetic attempt to obliterate an entire year class of defenceless animals." 3 week old seal pups Observers have stated that the so-called grey seal ‘harvest' is one of the cruellest in existence. Frightened and panicked pups are herded, clubbed and skinned in front of other still-nursing pups and their mothers. Sealers are allowed to enter the nursery to slaughter the three-week-old pups before they can swim and escape into the water, where they are more difficult to kill.
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Read the comments about this article and leave your own comment
Political that's the problem now some if not all of these goverment ministers dont have a clue or how to deal with wildife. O well if there is some cash in it for the goverment that may sway their mind to make very drasstic moves. So come on you goverment people think WILDLIFE for the future and not because your other so cauld friends think thats a great idea. These seals have a right to live just like you and me.
Ian Stewart (Scotland UK)
Posted by: Ian Stewart | 14 Feb 2010 13:16:18
Will the Canadian government ever listen to the public outcry regarding this needless massacre of life? Of course not.It's all about politics and about the feeble excuse that seals are destroying fish stocks. The only reason that fish stocks are declining is because fishermen are taking too much fish out of the water. Trawl nets can be several miles long and destroy entire colonies of fish stocks. The mesh sizes of these nets are far too small which does not allow even the smallest of fish to escape. And the winter olympics taking place in Canada? Again, an entirely political decision by the IOC, but what do you expect? After all they gave the summer olympics to Beijing in China which has one of the worse records of human rights in the world.
Posted by: ARFOR WILLIAMS | 12 Feb 2010 15:44:27
The Scatarie Island Wilderness Area is a category 1b wilderness under the IUCN system. This category is becoming meaningless when it does not afford protection to native species within the boundaries of the protected area.
Designated wilderness has always been clouded by the hunting issue, even when it is for food, but the innapropriateness of this was highlighted late last year when a state-sanctioned cull of grey wolves in Montana resulted in the death of a radio-collared alpha female in the Absaroka Beartooth Wilderness Area, along with seven other wolves. The wolf had wandered into the wilderness from the adjoining Yellowstone National Park, where hunting is prohibited, and was not expecting to get slaughtered. Its fate was sealed when grey wolves where taken off the Endangered Species List in the N Rockies. But why allow its killing in a 1b wilderness? It put no livestock at risk there? Perhaps there may have been a case if it had wandered much further, and on to farmland, but even then it can be disputed whether the grey wolf should have been taken off the Endangered Species List when compensation was provided to farmers for loss of livestock from wolves.
I have watched wolves in Yellowstone, and may even have seen one of the wolves that were slaughtered. I have also walked Absaroka Beartooth Wilderness, a beautiful place but now sullied by unnecessary blood. Wilderness must be the absolute refugia for wild nature. It is the arrogance of the human species that does not honour that, and chooses expediency for our own interests every time.
www.self-willed-land.org.uk
Posted by: Mark Fisher | 11 Feb 2010 09:54:02