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.”

Nice try Mr Gnome but thanks for the opportunity of putting the record
straight.

While your here and so keen to remove the fishing gnome angler groups
from your post, which I have reinstated,perhaps you could tell us
where's the fun in sitting on your fat arses on the edge of oversized
fishbowls, throwing loaves of bread into the water. What kind of lard
arse hobby is that?

Anyway.

The Wicked Wildlife Fund

http://www.wickedwildlifefund.com/abuse.html

The WWF Endorses the Killing of Wild Animals, Too
The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) gives special meaning to the word
“conservation.” The organization, founded in 1961 by a group of
wealthy trophy hunters, apparently believes that conserving animals
means keeping them around long enough for well-heeled “sportsmen” to
blast them out of the woods, oceans, skies, plains of Africa, and
jungles of Asia. Past WWF chapter presidents include C.R. “Pink”
Gutermuth, who also served as president of the National Rifle
Association, and trophy hunter Francis L. Kellogg, who is legendary
for his massive kills. In its early days, the WWF even used fur
auctions to raise funds.

Since then, the WWF has learned that most people are appalled by
hunting and trapping, so today, the organization veils its true stance
under phrases like “sustainable development,” arguing that killing is
acceptable under some circumstances. When answering difficult
questions about its policy on hunting, trapping, and whaling, the WWF
is careful never to state outright that it approves of all these
activities. But don’t be fooled, the WWF’s intentions are all too
clear and deadly.

Sealing
According to the Web site of the WWF’s Canadian office, “WWF is not an
animal welfare organization. We support the hunting and consumption of
wild animals provided the harvesting does not threaten the long-term
survival of wildlife populations. WWF has never opposed a sustainable
seal hunt in northern or eastern Canada.” However, despite the WWF’s
portrayal of the situation, the Canadian seal hunt is anything but a
“subsistence” hunt––it is the largest slaughter of marine mammals in
the world. Quotas established by the Canadian government have soared
to an all-time high: 350,000 seals per year for the next three years.
Not since the mid-1800s, when unrestricted slaughter saw a million
seals per year killed, has so much blood been shed on the ice off
Canada’s East Coast.
Worse is that the Canadian government has stated in internal documents
that having the WWF’s support for any raise in seal quotas is
important, and the WWF’s position statement suggests that it had been
working with the Canadian government before the quota was announced.
In other words, the WWF had the power to help avert the largest quota
of harp seal pups in history but chose, instead, to let it happen
without so much as a word of opposition.

Whaling
While the WWF states that it opposes “commercial whaling,” it does
support the slaughter of whales by native tribes and under some other
conditions. When asked directly about its policy, WWF is vague,
stating: “WWF’s views on whether sustainable whaling should be
permitted derive from its mission ‘to conserve nature and ecological
processes and to help build a future in which humans live in harmony
with nature.’” In the past, WWF officials have clearly stated that
“WWF International has the national WWF organizations behind it in the
view that as soon as one can ensure a sustainable commercial harvest
of the great whales under secure international control, then whaling
will no longer be a WWF concern.”

Sport Hunting
As one would expect of an organization founded by hunters, the WWF
does not oppose the slaughter of animals with guns and other weapons
for sport. Rather than working to stop the killing, the WWF believes
that hunting should be regulated, arguing that wealthy trophy hunters
can bring income to poorer nations. The WWF claims that it has no
power to stop hunting, stating, “The decision to allow trophy hunting
is a sovereign one made entirely by the governments concerned. … We
will continue to monitor governments’ enforcement of important trade
laws to ensure that trophy hunting is done within the legal standards
of that area.”

Elephants
The WWF believes that culling—another way of saying
“killing”—elephants is acceptable, as is the trade in ivory, because
the profits that it brings spur governments to keep elephants from
going extinct. In 2000, U.S. News & World Report reported that WWF
representatives traveled to Nairobi to ask the United Nations to lift
the ban on the ivory trade in order to allow a “sustainable harvest of
ivory for horns and hunting trophies.”

The WWF’s bizarre view—that we must kill some animals now in order to
save animals to kill later—has proved false time and again. The trade
in ivory has only encouraged rampant poaching, the senseless slaughter
of elephants. The WWF tries to duck the issue by falsely stating, “The
decision to cull, or to select animals from the herd for removal or
death, is indeed an agonizing choice, but it is one made entirely by
the governments concerned and there is no international involvement in
those decisions.”

Trapping
As with hunting and whaling, the WWF refuses to condemn the massive
killing of animals with steel-jaw leghold traps. While calling itself
a “preservationist” organization that “seek[s] to be the voice for
those creatures who have no voice,” the WWF stands back from the
issue, stating that “the trade in furs, skins, and other products of
animals that are not endangered isn’t the focus of our campaign.”
But no matter how hard the WWF tries to “greenwash” its support of
animal slaughter, its real message rings out loud and clear: Animals
are ours to hunt, trap, kill, poison, and use as we see fit. And
although appeals to preserve genetic diversity, ecosystems, and the
planet sound good on paper, they mean little if what the WWF is really
advocating is more efficient killing fields.

Or how about the poor chicken...hung upsidedown on a conveyor belt,
get their throats cut and move along as they bleed to death. How come
we don't see Paul Watson outside a slaughterhouse protesting that?
Why? Cause chickens are not CUTE....and no one is going to fill their
pockets with money to save a bloody roast chicken. Oh...a chicken
that's much younger than the seals that are hunted.

That's the only reason that the whitecoats are no longer hunted. The
fact that the hunt continues PROVES that it isn't only about the
pelts. The animals are taken for their meat and oil as well.

Yes...polar bears...animals on the verge of being endangered....are
still being slaughtered by AMERICAN hunters for their PELTS.

Sound familiar??????????

Except the endangered part. The seal population is huge...almost 6
million animals. But unlike deer and moose, the seals are CUTE.

Because it's the right