|
Bardot slams seal hunt
11/08/2004 14:15 - (SA)
Montreal - Screen heroine and animal rights activist Brigitte Bardot on Tuesday called on Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin to halt Canada's annual "massacre" of young seals.
"It's a massacre, of astounding cruelty, in which young animals see their future executioner approach, before being knocked senseless with a crushing blow from a club," Bardot said in a letter to Martin.
She claimed in the letter obtained by AFP that the seals were then "skinned on the spot, sometimes still conscious, under the eyes of the next victim".
Canada disputes such claims by anti-seal hunt campaigners, and argues that 98% of seals are killed in accordance with the principles of a "cruelty-free hunt".
Bardot recalled that 27 years ago, when she first travelled to eastern Canada to protest against the hunt, the annual quota of seals to be killed was set at 130 000.
"Now, it has climbed to 350 000 seals," she said.
The Canadian government claims that harp seals are not endangered, as their numbers which reached 1.8 million in 1970 have now soared to 5.2 million.
"Be that man, by defending the weak ... who can restore my confidence and hope in humanity, which has lost all sense of compassion," Bardot pleaded.
Canada shut down the latest hunt, in eastern Newfoundland, after just over one day in April, after fisheries and oceans department officials judged a quota of 246 900 dead seals had been reached.
Nearly 100 000 harp seals were killed the month before in the Magdalen Islands, a Quebec archipelago in the Gulf of St Lawrence.
In all, hunters were permitted to kill 350 000 harp seals on the ice floes this year.
Canada says harp seals are not in danger and their exploding population is endangering cod stocks.
Last year, the government authorised a cull of nearly a million harp seals over three years.
Amid calls for boycotts and criticism in the 1980s, Canada banned the killing of pups younger than 12 days old.
|
News
