And we'll do it like this:
TORONTO - A day after tens of thousands of seal pups were hunted for their pelts, Canadian wildlife officials on Wednesday were counting to determine if hunters had reached their quota.
As Tuesday's hunt ended, activists called the hunt inhumane, with some seal pups being skinned alive.
The hunt — carried out with rifles and spears and reviled by animal rights activists — was held in the Gulf of St. Lawrence off the coast of Quebec and in the frozen barrens of the Atlantic Ocean off Newfoundland.
Hunters were allowed to kill 350,000 young seals this year, the largest amount since the government instituted quotas in the 1960s. If that number wasn't reached Tuesday, the hunt will be extended for another 24 hours.
Wildlife officials said that the harp seal population is growing at 5.2 million and pelts are garnering record prices of about $50 each.
Steve Outhouse, a spokesman for Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans, said wildlife officials were working with the seal hunters to determine the size of the hunt. It wasn’t clear when the count would be publicly announced.
Earlier this year, the Humane Society of the United States took out full-page newspaper ads urging Americans to cancel trips to Canada and boycott Canadian products.
In 1972, the United States passed the Marine Mammal Protection Act which bars the hunting of marine mammals, including seals, sea lions and polar bears.
Many countries, including the United States, still ban imports of seal products, but Canada supports the hunt to help its economically suffering coastal towns. The industry earned about $15 million last year, primarily from pelt sales to Norway, Denmark and China.
Outhouse said that “our position is based on science. Right now the harp seal population off Canada’s east coast is booming — 5.2 million as opposed to less than a third of that in the 1970s.”
“Most Canadians are okay with the hunt in principle," he added, "as long as it’s being done in a way that is sustainable and as humanely as possible.”
In both hunts, the seals are taken in the "whelping" areas where they born a few weeks earlier.
For many of the sealers, most of whom also fish for cod or crab, the seal hunt is the first seasonal income they will make this year, said Earl McCurdy, head of the union.
After rising international outrage over the hunt in the 1970s and 1980s forced the collapse of historic European markets for seal pelts, Canada passed legislation in 1987 that restricted the methods used to hunt seals.
Canada banned the killing of whitecoat seal pups younger than 12 days and limited sealers to the use of small boats rather than large commercial vessels.
As markets for seal skins and products slowly revived in eastern Europe and Asia, the hunt’s economic benefits were seen as an important way to replace income lost when the centuries old cod fishery collapsed in the early 1990s.
But animal rights groups say the cull of defenseless seal pups two weeks to three months old amounts to nothing less than a slaughter of the innocents. The seals are clubbed or shot to death on the ice floes where the mammals give birth and prepare to mate before heading to the Arctic.
“It’s a slaughter of one of the world’s greatest wildlife spectacles,” said IFAW’s Rebecca Aldworth. “The seal nursery is absolutely pristine and beautiful just days before the hunters come. And then, just days later, that peace on the ice is shattered by the hunters who club and shoot everything in sight.”
On Saturday, Montreal’s Gazette mockingly noted that “limousine liberals from Manhattan to Knightsbridge are fretting and signing petitions about the fate of the cute little seals off Canada’s east coast.”
The newspaper then offered a recipe for seal-flipper pie, a traditional Newfoundland dish.
The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this story.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4738584/
(Kidding, I know that's not realistic. But as a member of the Texas Marine Mammal Stranding Network [we help rescue and treat beached dolphins and so forth], I had to offer it up as a suggestion.)
