From Sunday 1st July 2012 and continuing for 139 days, 80 000 seal pups will be rounded up at three breeding colonies in Cape Cross in Namibia and Hout Bay Cape Town, South Africa and beaten to death for their fur!
In addition to this, 6000 bulls will be shot, and their genetals removed and sold to the east as aphrodisiacs!
Unprocessed Cape fur seal pup pelts are valued at about $6 (R50,00) each while the bull gentials sell for about $139 (R1171,00). The real money is in the selling of the processes furs . The pelts are bought processed and resold by the Turkish-Australian "King of Fur", Hatem Yavuz -incidentally also Namibian's honorary consul to Turkey.
In the 1990's this event wiped out a third of the Namibian seal population.
In 2008 sealing in Namibia generated about $513 000 in exchange for 58 000 dead pups and 5 500 dead bulls. In that same year seal watching activities attracted about 100 000 tourists and generated just more than $2 million in direct tourism expenditure.
The quotas of pups to be killed is calculated by a mathematical model allowing between 20 - 30 percent of pups to be culled, however the culling itself causes an ecological interference with regards to regular breedingand as aresult, less pups are born in the following years.
We need to let Namibian ombudsman that beating innocent pups to death for their fur is cruel and totally unacceptable!
