For thousands of years, harp seals have migrated from Greenland down the coast of Canada, stopping each spring to give birth on the ice floes. Every year, a band of fishers descends on the ice to beat hundreds of thousands of seals to death and sell the animals' pelts on the international fur market. Sealers routinely hook baby seals in the eye, cheek, or mouth and drag them across the ice, often while the animals are still conscious. Many of the seals killed in the massacre are only a few weeks old.
Baby seals stand no chance against club-wielding seal hunters, pups must look on as fellow seals are bludgeoned to death only to then meet the same bloody fate. The commercial seal slaughter is an off-season profit venture for the fishing industry, and it accounts for less than 1 percent of Newfoundland's economy. The seal slaughter is not a subsistence activity for native peoples sealing accounts for only about 3 percent of the annual slaughter.
The price of seal fur is plummeting as international outrage against the seal slaughter rises. The U.S. and the European Union have banned seal products, and world leaders such as President Barack Obama and His Holiness The Dalai Lama have denounced the massacre.
The annual seal slaughter will continue unless people like you speak out and take action to stop it, so please add your voice to the global outcry against Canada's shameful seal massacre. Please write to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and Canadian ambassadors around the world to demand that they bring the massacre to an immediate end.
I was shocked to learn that the Canadian government allows hundreds of thousands of seals to be slaughtered in the annual war on seals. These gentle animals are shot or have their skulls smashed in by sealers. Seals are then skinned for their fur, often while they are still conscious. The idea that these animals are murdered so innocently, in front of their own young is horrendous.
Please end the seal slaughter immediately and spare Canada any further embarrassment.
