Austria Gives Full Support to the Seals
The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society is today applauding the nation of Austria for voting unanimously yesterday in support of a complete ban on the importation, processing and distribution of all seal pelts from all species of seals.
Austria joins Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy and Croatia in banning seal pelts with bills before the governments of all the other European nations pending.
Austrian Minister for the Environment, Josef Proll (OVP), stated that he will also work for a ban on the EU-level.
Despite decades of worldwide protests, the Canadian government has continued to allow the slaughter of more than a million harp seals in the last three
years. In response many countries are now introducing national bans on seal products in order to close the markets and send a clear message to Canada.
The Canadian government has wasted countless thousands of taxpayer dollars sending delegations to Europe in support of Canada's commercial seal hunt. Millions of more dollars have been spent on subsidies and Coast Guard icebreaker assistance and providing the sealers with cigarettes and food while they are stranded on the ice by their own folly.
Yet Europeans are listening to the facts and the facts are that this is a cruel, unsustainable and wasteful hunt which must be stopped, and they want
no part of it.
The quota for this year's hunt has been set at 270,000 harp seals. To date, at least 195,693 harp seals have been reported killed.
Dozens of sealing boats remain trapped in floe ice and the damages to the boats will be very costly for many of the sealers. Insurance premiums are expected to go higher than the average $20,000 presently charged for coverage.
This year nature has joined forces with efforts to apply economic pressure against the seal hunt. The ice and wind conditions on the Eastern coast of Newfoundland have been an ally to the seals and a nightmare to the sealers and “that’s what we like to see,” said Captain Alex Cornelissen, the Master of the Sea Shepherd ship Farley Mowat.
“We will defeat this obscenity,” said Captain Paul Watson. “The barbarism of sealing has no place in a decent society and no place in the 21st Century. We need to keep the pressure up on undermining the markets for seal pelts and we need to continue to boycott Canadian products and tourism. Economics is a language the government of Canada understands and that is the language we are speaking to them in.”
Link to the Toronto Star article suggesting the seal hunt may be on the way out:
http://www.thestar.com/News/article/206397
Captain Paul Watson
Founder and President of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (1977-
Co-Founder - The Greenpeace Foundation (1972)
Co-Founder - Greenpeace International (1979)
Director of the Sierra Club USA (2003-2006)
Director - The Farley Mowat Institute
Director - www.harpseals.org
"Sail forth - steer for the deep waters only,
Reckless O soul, exploring, I with thee and thou with me,
For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go,
And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all."
- Walt Whitman
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