GUITAR BOARD

> http://www.seashepherd.org/
>
> b
> 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 Shepherds 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 its part of their culture, said Captain Watson who himself
> grew up in an Eastern fishing village in the Canadian province of New
> Brunswick. Its 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. Its 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 Ive 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.