Sea Shepherd Announces Seal Defense Campaign 2008!

Omaha Steve

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Sun Mar-02-08 04:41 PM
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Sea Shepherd Announces Seal Defense Campaign 2008!

Sea Shepherd Crew to Shift from the Southern Ice to the Northern Ice

Captain Paul Watson and some of his crew will not rest after
defending whales when they return to Australia after three and a half
months of chasing and harassing Japanese whaling ships, and will
instead continue on to defend baby seals.

Within days of returning to Australia in late March, they will be
flying halfway around the world to Bermuda where Sea Shepherd's other
ship the Farley Mowat is docked. From there they will head North into
the ice packs off Eastern Canada to defend baby harp seals from the
ruthless clubs of Canadian sealers.

"There is no rest on planetary duty," said Captain Paul Watson from
onboard the Steve Irwin off the coast of Antarctica. "Half our year
is spent amongst icebergs and on ice floes. Our job is to hunt the
hunters to defend their victims and that takes us from the bottom of
the world to the top and many places in between."

Captain Watson has been fighting the Canadian seal slaughter all his
life. It was shut down in 1984 and resurrected in 1994.

"All our victories are usually temporary," he said. "Unfortunately
our defeats are usually permanent."

The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society is confident that years of risk
and effort will soon pay off. The European nations are banning seal
products and seal products have been banned in the United States
since 1972. Sea Shepherd has been slowly lobbying to remove the
markets at the same time as we have been mounting dramatic
confrontations on the ice to physically save the seals from the cruel
clubs of the sealers.

Patience and persistence is paying off. The seal hunt survives only
because of subsidies doled out to the sealing industry by the
government of Canada. It has become a glorified welfare scheme where
in return for killing seals for a few weeks the sealers can qualify
for unemployment insurance for the rest of the year.

"They say it's part of their culture," said Captain Watson who
himself grew up in an Eastern fishing village in the Canadian
province of New Brunswick. "It's a culture based on the cruel
clubbing of baby seals for a few weeks each year and drinking
Canadian Club and beer the rest of the year. It's a culture that any
Maritimer with half a brain abandoned generations ago."

In addition to the hazards of thick ice and nasty weather, the Sea
Shepherd crew face the threat of violence from the sealers and the
threat of arrest under the Canadian "Seal Protection regulations"
that make it a criminal offense to "witness or document the killing
of a seal without the permission of the government of Canada."

"As a kid I remember these baby killers bragging how they would slice
open the beating heart of the first baby seal they kill each spring,"
said Captain Watson. "They drank the hot blood and smeared it cross
upon their foreheads and dabbed blood on their cheeks. They called it
the "Rites of Spring." I called them barbarians then, and I call them
barbarians still, and as a Canadian and a Maritimer, I have been
ashamed of this bloody evil tradition all my life and I've dedicated
my life to shutting this monstrous obscenity down forever, and I
believe that soon we will see that day when the killing is ended."

In 2005 twelve Sea Shepherd crew were arrested after being attacked
and assaulted by sealers on the ice. Despite being struck by sealing
clubs, punched and kicked, not one sealer was arrested for assault.
The attack was video-taped and the sealers identified yet the Royal
Canadian Mounted Police stated there was "insufficient evidence" to
charge the sealers. The Sea Shepherd crew were jailed and fined for
approaching within a half a nautical mile of a seal being killed.