Following Entry Posted 3/26/2006 04:25:00 PM

Flying Seal Guts 

(Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island) The hunting of cute and fuzzy harp seal pups in the Gulf of St. Lawrence commenced yesterday with a meddlesome crowd of animal rights activists and media providing interference.

From TheChronicleHerald.ca:

Protesters had to dodge flying seal guts pitched at them by angry hunters Saturday as tempers flared on the first day of Canada's East Coast seal slaughter.

News reporters and animal rights activists tried to get as close as permitted to the hunt on the Gulf of St. Lawrence, but their presence infuriated sealers as they hunted for scarce animals on small, drifting ice pans.

At one point, a sealing vessel charged up to a small Zodiac inflatable boat carrying reporters and protesters, and a sealer flung seal intestines into the midst of the observers.

Eeeeww! Being slathered with seal guts has to be particularly unpleasant.

Despite the enduring protests, however, the Canadian government has authorized the seal hunters to take 91,000 animals in the Gulf of St. Lawrence this year. Next month, another 234,000 seals are authorized to be taken off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador. These numbers seem large but not when viewed in relation to the estimated total of over 5 million seals which, by the way, have been blamed for the diminishing codfish stocks in the North Atlantic. Nonetheless, seal harvesting is a messy business which naturally energizes fervent environmentalists and animal rights activists.

In opposition, Rebecca Aldworth of the Humane Society of the United States and other protesters express several primary complaints, including:

- Too many seals are being taken,

- The government is not factoring global warming into calculations for the hunt, and

- The inhumane methods of killing the seals.

Most important to the hunt opponents is the reported skinning of seals while they are still alive and images of suffering animals waiting for the final whack. Since the animal activists appear to disapprove of every method used to kill the seals, one could assume that none is acceptable.

However, a resolution for the conflict between the seal hunters and their opponents may exist. There is one method for quickly killing animals that the liberal community of animal rights activists and environmentalists would likely approve since it has gained wide acceptance elsewhere. The method would require the seal hunters to be present at the time of the seal pup's birth. The hunter would wait for the baby seal's head to come out of the mother's body, then the skull would be crushed and the brains would be sucked out using a vacuum. The animal's quick demise is guaranteed and, ostensibly, humane.

Previous post: Commercial Harp Seal Hunting

Companion post at The Jawa Report.
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