McCartney tries to save seals
2006-03-03 09:05
East Coast - Former Beatle Paul McCartney lay down on an ice floe next to a baby seal on Thursday and pleaded with Canada to scrap an annual hunt that kills about 300 000 of the young animals.
McCartney and his wife Heather, both dressed in red one-piece survival suits, also patted the white-coated seal after venturing out onto the ice 16km northwest of the Magdalen Islands in the Gulf of St Lawrence, off Canada's east coast.
The Canadian government said the rock star didn't fully understand the nature of the two-month hunt, which it said was good for the local economy, humane, and kept a booming population of 5.8 million animals in check.
Defenceless seals
But, pictures of hunters clubbing or shooting defenceless seals for the years had turned the event into a public relations nightmare for the government and prompted several boycotts of Canadian products.
McCartney said: "We just believe that ... for this whole place to be a sea of red, and for these pups we're seeing today to be dead, just for their fur, is just not something that should be happening in this day and age."
At one point the baby seal barked loudly at Heather, who reeled back in surprise. McCartney said: "Oh, he's feisty. I like that."
Phil Jenkins, a spokesperson for Canada's department of fisheries and oceans, said white-coated seals had not been hunted since 1987. The seals' white coats disappeared after four weeks, while those animals killed in the hunt were eight weeks or older.
'Celebrity of the year'
Jenkins said the United States animals rights activists who arranged the McCartneys' trip were giving them an inaccurate and incomplete picture of the hunt.
He said: "We see this every year. It's the celebrity of the year. This year's celebrity has a bit higher candlepower than last year's, but the facts of the hunt are that it's more humane than ever, it's growing as an economically viable industry and the herd is in fantastic shape.
"They (the McCartneys) don't have a complete picture of this hunt, what it means to the people who engage in it and what it means to the (local) economy."
The Canadian government had yet to decide how many seals could be killed this year, in part because warm weather had meant there were far fewer ice floes, where the animals normally gave birth. The hunt usually starts at the end of March.
Canadian officials said they monitored the hunt closely to ensure the seals were killed humanely - an assertion that activists dismissed as nonsense.