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[igotthisguitar]

McCartneys Join Effort to End Seal Hunt
By BETH DUFF-BROWN, Associated Press Writer
Thu Mar 2, 3:13 PM ET

CHARLOTTETOWN, Prince Edward Island - Opponents of Canada's seal hunt have a powerful ally in their bid to end the annual slaughter: Paul McCartney, who pledged to take to the ice floes Thursday and frolic with the doe-eyed pups before the harvest gets under way.



The former Beatle and his wife, Heather Mills McCartney, arrived Wednesday night in this fishing community on Canada's Atlantic coast and intend to land a helicopter on the ice in the Gulf of St. Lawrence if Thursday's weather permits.

The longtime animal-rights activists want to publicize the plight of the fluffy white pups, which are calved and weaned from their mothers on the frigid ice before being clubbed to death.

"Previous Canadian governments have allowed this heartbreaking hunt to continue despite the fact that majority of its citizens — as well as those in Europe and America — are opposed to it," the McCartneys said in a joint statement before heading up to the ice floes Thursday morning.

"We have complete faith that Prime Minister Harper will take swift and decisive actions to end the slaughter of these defenseless seal pups for good."

The United States has banned Canadian seal products since 1972 and the European Union banned the white pelts of baby seals in 1983.

The British government also is considering banning the import of seal goods. Groups such as Respect for Animals and the Humane Society of the United States, which are coordinating the McCartneys' visit, are encouraging people to boycott Canadian seafood as a show of solidarity.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060302/ap_en_mu/canada_seal_hunt_7;_ylt=AhGkeoBBQ9qaCAm_ZulO8dnBaMYA;_ylu=X3oDMTA5bGVna3NhBHNlYwNzc3JlbA--

[mindmetoo]

Here we go again. One of the richest guys in the world telling the bone poorest people in Canada to give up one of the few remaining traditions in their lives that earns them some meager amounts of money. Yeah!

[Satori]

[khyber]

why doesn't he beat the seals? Don't they know what kind of anguish they put the fish through?

[Hollywoodaction]

Charlottetown is a 'fishing community'? I thought it was the capital of PEI and the birthplace of Canada.


I asked a seal hunter if he clubbed seals and he said, "I can't do that. It's too painful...I got bad shoulders and hips from clubbing those facken pups. Now, I just bring my stereo and play some of that Johnny McCartney's music. You should see the facken pups bash their heads on the ice."

[Bulsajo]

I haven't made up my mind where I stand on the whole seal hunt thing, and I dislike the following columnist nor do I think very highly of the paper he writes for; However, this column does one or two decent points:


The Beatle vs. the Fisherman

By MICHAEL HARRIS

Let me begin by affirming that I am a follower of Marx and Lennon -- Groucho Marx and John Lennon.

Which is to say, I believe that laughter and music are indispensable to survival on this dear, dirty planet. On the music side, I was the first kid in my school to sport Beatle boots, a collarless jacket, and to sing in a really bad band. And hair? Let's not talk about hair.

So it is with a full heart clot of regret that I see one of the golden boys of adolescence, the incomparable Paul McCartney, following in the high-heel prints of Brigitte Bardot to denounce the Canadian seal hunt.

McCartney is arguably the biggest celebrity in the world. In the entertainment business such clout is usually squandered. It is employed to either arrange one's utter dissolution, as in the case of Kurt Cobain, or, like William Shatner, to become a fatted capon of the marketing world when the glory days are over.

But for some stars the cornucopia of their blessings occasionally causes the old guilt complex to kick in. So after ER made George Clooney into blue-chip beefcake, and he got to play poker with Brad Pitt and the boys, he developed a social conscience and produced important movies like Good Night and Good Luck and Syriana. These cautionary tales traded special effects for especially effective social commentary. It was a nice rest from watching baby pterodactyls burst out of Sigourney Weaver's heaving chest.

So what do Sir Paul and Heather Mills McCartney choose to do with the most powerful celebrity-hood of all, the sublime afterglow of being an ex-Beatle? Do they give a free concert to the bedraggled homeless of New Orleans, make a musical stand in Darfur, or battle nuclear proliferation on the Indian sub-continent? No, they choose to torment the poor fishermen of Atlantic Canada in a cause that is unjust, dishonest, and mercenary to the core. Hands across the water stiffing for the U.S. Humane Society.

Paul and his wife plan to take a bunch of helicopters to the ice and play with seal pups in front of the cameras before the guys with less time on their hands begin the real work -- harvesting an ocean resource like any other. The federal government has sanctioned the hunt as a "cultural right" of Atlantic Canadians and set a quota -- about 325,000 animals a year since 2003. The seal hunt is as legal as any other abattoir operation. The difference is that this slaughterhouse is outdoors, where you can see -- and be seen.

Those who oppose the seal hunt insist that it is a heartbreaking slaughter. What slaughterhouse operation isn't? For cattle it's either captive bolt stunning, where a metal rod is blasted into the animal's brain; an electrically induced grand mal seizure; or plain old throat cutting. Do they suffer? It's hard for the hired help to know, given that they often work on assembly lines where 309 animals per hour are "processed" on the way to the grocery store. The "T" in T-bone is for terror.

And don't tell me that large numbers of animals in a conventional slaughterhouse don't experience dread through those acute eyes, ears and noses of theirs. If you've ever seen a tractor-trailer load of hogs parked and shuffling at the gas station while the driver grabs a burger, you know that they know they're not on their way to Green Acres.

The point is this: As spectator sport, mass killing of anything -- fish, fowl, or four footed -- is never an agreeable sight. But if the seal hunt ought to be stopped, so too should the operations that supply our barbecues and ovens, that send animals to scalding tanks, and killing floors and dangle them by one leg from chains on their wide-eyed way to the knife. So too should farm operations that force-feed geese to bloat their livers for foie gras. And let's not forget all those defenseless calves that die in the name of our right to veal cutlets.

Paul McCartney has spent his influence in a cause where hypocrisy is in a foot race with meddlesome ignorance.

If he had bothered to ask, Canadian fishermen could have told him that nature was thrown out of balance when international protests first closed the seal hunt in 1983. They could have told him that you can't protect one species in the ocean while mercilessly fishing all others without dire consequences to the environment.

We got them in 1992 when gross over-fishing exacerbated by the explosion of the protected seal herds contributed to the collapse and closure of the great northern cod fishery off Newfoundland. A seal consumes 6% of its body weight in fish every day. There are now 5 million of them but Sir Paul didn't stop on the long and winding road to do the math or the thinking. They're starving in Africa, dying in Iraq, and McCartney makes his stand on Iles de la Madeleine doing photo ops with seals.

On the other side of Strawberry Fields, Lennon must be cringing.

[Hollywoodaction]

Since sharks have essentially disappeared from the north of the Atlantic Ocean, humans are essentially the only predators left who can control the growth of the grey seal population. As a result, the number of grey seals has been growing at an incredible rate. If my memory serves me right, it has been doubling in size every 15 year or so since the 1920's.

[jjurabong]

Anybody watching the McCartneys debate Danny Williams on Larry King right now?

Heather Mills comes across as very obnoxious - She's not doing herself any favors.

Edited because I can't believe Paul doesn't even know he's not in Newfoundland - Good lord what a farce.

Williams invited the McCartneys to come to Newfoundland to properly discuss the issue. Paul in, Charlottetown, PEI, says to him " I am in Newfoundland"...

[Manner of Speaking]

[jajdude]

Whoops. I just posted about this before finding this thread. I think seals are delicious, and if they were ugly no one would care.

[ontheway]

This is a really old issue. I remember watching Brigitte Bardot on TV in Paris with a group of expats, more than 30 years ago. She could really stir up the emotions. There she was, crying on TV:

"Bebe phoques. Bebe phoques."

and all the guys kept repeating:

"Bebe phoques, bebe phoques, bebe phoques..."


edit: oops. I knew it was wrong when I posted it. "phoque" not "foque" but I just couldn't see what was wrong. It's been a long time since I lived in France. Spelling is hard for me in any language.

[mindmetoo]

[Hollywoodaction]

[PEIGUY]

You should see how the media on PEI are reacting..since he arrived the only paper in charlottetown has been doing stories about people who met this great guy. They even told a story about a lady who met him and his wife in a Tim's no less! www.theguardian.pe.ca I think it's cool though that he just flew in with no worries about anything (it's PEI.. he might get a pie in the face at best )

[ontheway]

Hollywoodaction,

Thanks for pointing out my spelling error. It's been a long time and my French is really rusty.