Since February 1973, when I first set foot in Canada, I have been writing
letters to the various Prime Ministers, senators, MP's, Ministers..., you
name it, regarding that one thing I truly abhor about Canada: the seal hunt.
Has anything changed in the past 33 years?
The answer is a very sad 'NO'; Canadian government officials still set the
quotas for this massive holocaust without foregoing one bite of their
tax-funded lunches. Yes, have a martini on the clubbing to death of another
300.000 new born seals, why not?

I have been a Canadian citizen for 28 years and I still am ashamed of the
way Canadians treat their native animals. They think nothing of using the
still inhumane leg-hold traps to catch wildlife. Bears get shot by
conservation officers on a regular basis just for getting into people's
messy garbage, bbq's or their backyards in the middle of the forest, geese
get shot because they foul up the parks already fouled up by this fast-food
nation, cats and dogs get killed because people are allowed to breed their
pets indiscriminately, whales and dolphins die in the absurdly unnatural
waters of malls and aquariums, crabs and lobsters sit 6-crabs high in
water-tanks at supermarkets, claws tied, until someone takes them away and
boils them alive, wolves get shot because we deem their numbers too high,
cows get mass-slaughtered, aka culled, because they may or may not make us
sick, poultry is in that category too, and mass-murdering them to feed us
or just because they could carry a virus is no skin off our backs.

In summary, we think it is our godgiven right to own all the animals of the
world and we can do with them whatever we please.
We are wrong about that, but we don't know it, nor do we care to know.
Anyone who has read Daniel Quinn's "Ishmael" may have been awakened to read
how wrong we truly are, but then, how many of us read?

We fool ourselves by using words like 'culling' instead of killing.
When we eat beef, we mostly eat cows who have been cruelly mass-slaughtered
after a sad, sad life in small confinement; when we eat our pork-chop, we do
not think of the electrically-prodded animal dumped in with a large number
of other terrified pigs pushed and shoved into a truck on its way to the
slaughterhouse; when we clean out the legs of our whole lobster or crab, we
do not care that this is an animal who was treated as food while still
alive. No, animals are nothing but food to fill our overly-fed bellies.

Yes, I am a Canadian. Am I proud to be one? Not as long as my fellow men and
women slaughter their animals the way they do. Obesity is their punishment,
but I think that is hardly an appropriate sentence.

Manon Keij
Surrey