Pups are clubbed & then skinned alive in front of their mothers... You can hear their bleating as the babies are dragged away
Dennis Ellam And Roland Leon In The Gulf Of St Lawrence
BLOOD is spreading across the ice. Obscene scarlet on pure white.
At the stroke of 6am yesterday - right on schedule - Canada's annual slaughter of the seal pups got under way.
It's the biggest and the most barbaric cull anywhere on Earth.
Errr...in Rwanda 750000 were macheted alive.
By the time you read this 70,000 pups will have been killed. A total of 325,000 will die - either clubbed to death or shot - within the next three weeks. But it might take just five days.
As dawn broke yesterday the bloodbath began, with men jumping from their fleet of boats, running across the ice, swinging their spiked clubs as they went.
The impassioned pleas of Paul and Heather McCartney and Brigitte Bardot - and worldwide condemnation - count for nothing out here. Thirty-eight years to the day after our sister paper the Daily Mirror's iconic front page revealed the horror of the cull to the nation, nothing has changed.
No. The Humane Society and IFAW have filled their coffers with donations whilst hypocrits rage on aboot Canada eating their Sunday roast. I reckon the slaughterhouse has culled more than 325000 baby cows this year.
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Just 24 hours earlier, when we flew into this remote wilderness, it was still untouched, a natural nursery for thousands of month-old pups, basking on the ice in the thin sunshine, their proud mothers beside them.
Hahaha. Did the seal mummy say they were proud? How do we know the seal mummy wasn't raped by a bunch of horny male seals? What does a proud seal look like?
Today, the pups' freshly-skinned carcasses, still steaming from their body heat, litter the ice. Their mothers lie beside them, pining for their dead babies, their mournful bleating carried in the cold air.
Pining? Like a Norwegian Blue Parrot? They're not pining for a pup, they're pining for a fucking codfish that they eat, but since the EU fished them out they're left to feed on krill. Oh the horror!
Nothing prepares you for such a sickening spectacle.
They call it a hunt, of course, to make it sound like a noble challenge between man and beast. But a harp seal can't run like a fox, it has nowhere to hide like a deer in a forest, it can't fight back like a grizzly. It just lies there, helplessly waiting to be slaughtered.
It's only three weeks since the McCartneys came here, to make their emotional and - out here - controversial plea for the slaughter to be abandoned.
The seal pup that the McCartneys cuddled? It's fucking dead now because the mother abandoned it because it'd been touched by a human. Fact. So make that 325 001 dead seals- come on back Paul, but don't go near the whitecoats because we don't hunt them. Tool.
Canada's response? It promptly increased the quota hunters are allowed to kill by another 5,000. "When so-called celebrities come across here making their pronouncements - wealthy people telling folks how they should earn their living - well, we're outraged," government official Phil Jenkins, told me. "We don't feel we need to justify the hunt to anyone."
I paid £12 my "observer's" permit allowing me to watch the slaughter. The "hunters" have paid just £2.50 each for their licences to kill. A top hunter will bag around 1,000 pups a week - and earn over £3,000.
This year, the Canadian government has decreed, 325,000 seal pups can be culled on their journey out of the St Lawrence, from the breeding ground where they were born to the open sea.
Most will die before they have even taken their first swim.
There is simply no logic in the old argument that seals have to be culled to keep their population down and protect fish stocks. Nature has its own ways.
Nature can't sink EU trawlers raping the ocean floor. Nature can't play politics with Galician fishers from Vigo.
The waters in the Gulf are warming, the ice is thinner than it has ever been in living memory.
For hundreds of square miles it is broken and cracked like a vast crazy paving. Amazingly, our helicopter pilot managed to put down photographer Roland Leon and myself on a pan of ice that was barely any bigger than the chopper, while the floe pitched and rolled all around us in a raging gale.
In these treacherous conditions, . countless new-iborn seals, would have I fallen into the sea and ' drowned anyway.
In fact, as the Canadian government now admit, the impetus for the hunt is commercial. It makes money.
Yesterday I watched in horror as the hunters swarmed on to the ice with knives dangling from their belts and their traditional "hakapik" clubs slung over their shoulders.
The hakapik is a multipurpose killing tool - a heavy wooden club, with a hammer head on one side to crush a seal pup's skull, and on the other a hook to drag away the carcass to be skinned.
THE first two days of the hunt are always the busiest, I am told. There must be 50 men swarming over the ice - and thousands of pups waiting to be slaughtered. So many to kill, so little time.
The hunters are supposed to club them three times over the head, then touch their eyeball to make sure they are dead before being skinned.
A moment ago one baby seal was a living creature, looking up towards its executioner, fear etched on its face. Its last gesture is to open its mouth wide. A silent cry for mercy.
Now it's a battered heap, waiting for the skinners who follow the hunters. Blood runs from its wounds and its mouth.
The force of the blows has forced its eyes from its sockets. I turn away only to catch out of the corner of my eye the sudden movement of a bloody shape.
A seasoned hunter will you tell this is just a death spasm. Some vets, however, think differently.
According to one report,
as many as 40 per cent of seal pups
could still be alive when they are skinned.
Nothing like strong statementws of facts.
This one is wriggling and writhing in agony, as it is dragged along, leaving a crimson trail. The hunters lift it, still thrashing, aboard their boat to skin out of sight of our camera.
Earlier I met Robbie Marsland in the offices of the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW).
HE showed me a collection of seal products - tins of seal meat, hats and gloves made from seal fur, even a seal's penis, a delicacy in the Far East where they powder it down and drink it with wine as an aphrodisiac.
Discreetly, the Canadians are now hoping to push seal oil onto the market too, in Omega 3 capsules.
But the main prize is the skin. This year's price is around £30 a pelt, boosted by a sudden demand from the big fashion houses.
Last season, for example, you could have bought a Gucci sealskin coat.
That's why the hunters prefer to club the pups' skulls rather than shoot them and risk hitting the hide. Nothing ruins a £1,000 Gucci coat more than an unsightly bullet-hole.
In the isolated fishing communities around Newfoundland and Labrador, they will tell you that the seal hunt is vital to their way of life, and has been for generations.
"A man has to feed his family, that's the stark truth out here," says Mark Small, 59, a hunter for more than 40 years, like his father and his grandfather before him. "A guy can earn 6,000 dollars in a week. That's one quarter of his annual income. How do you take that away?
"The world thinks we're barbarians, but we're not. Our ancestors settled here to work the oceans, and we have respect for the animals that live here. Seals too. But what do you do with pests in other countries? You get rid of them.
"We don't need you folks to tell us how to run our lives."
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HOW YOU CAN STOP THIS SLAUGHTER...
SIR Paul McCartney and wife Heather issued the following statement through the Sunday Mirror...
"We are devastated to learn that 325,000 of these harp seals - almost all of them defenceless babies - will be clubbed and shot to death. Compassionate people from all around the world are opposed to this seal hunt, including the majority of Canadians, and we urge them to contact their Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, and ask him to ban the hunt.
"We chose to come out to the ice floes before the hunt began because it would break our hearts to have to see the cruelty of the hunt.
"But we are absolutely committed to making sure this is the last slaughter of baby seals in Canada anyone will ever have to witness. An important strategy to ending the hunt is closing down the global markets for seal products. Countries such as Greenland, Mexico, and Italy have taken steps to ban the import of sealskins.
"When countries stop buying sealskins, there will be no reason for sealers to kill the seals. We are asking every single country to please, please stop buying seal products so this hunt will stop. We're proposing a fair solution to all of this - a sealing licence buy-back plan.
"This is a win-win solution: fishermen would be compensated for any lost revenue when the hunt is closed, and Canada would have a graceful way to put an end to a cruel and needless practice that should have been stopped many years ago."
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TO register your support for the IF AW campaign against seal hunting, visit their website at
www.stopthesealhunt.co.uk
Make sure your donation is a big one- this is their biggest annual fundraiser, and the directors all make $US100 000+ salaries.
