[4animals] Seal "Hunt" Must Stop - Write your local MP re Seal Slaughter

[K]

For everyone in Ottawa Centre, Paul Dewar's email is Dewar.P at parl.gc.ca
   
  In the past, Ed Broadbent didn't answer any of my letters.   However, the NDP's position is that it supports the hunt.   Please take the time to write your MP,
  this link will assist in finding your local MP's coordinates.   http://canada.gc.ca/directories/direct_e.html
   
  Here is the letter I wrote to Paul Dewar.  Please feel free to plagarize.

Subject: Seal "Hunt" Must Stop
To: Dewar.P at parl.gc.ca

    Dear Paul,
   
  Right now, another Paul is out on the east coast of Canada to draw attention to our national seal slaughter with the ultimate goal of having it ended, once and for all.  I hope he succeeds.   It is a truly horrific spectacle, the bloody and painful deaths of 300 thousand plus marine mammals every March.  The seals are still so young, they cannot even propel themselves to move, they cannot swim.  The proverbial maxim "shooting fish in a barrel" comes to mind.
   
  Please don't toe the party line on this.  We are educated and know that the seals are not responsible for the cod decline.  We know that the revenue incurred from this barbaric practise represents a minuscule portion of income for off-season fishers.   We know that there are other means to employ off-season fishers without having to engage in yet another bloody reign of terror on the floes this Spring. 
   
  The majority of Canadians are against this "hunt".  During the recent election campagin, so many Canadians, Liberals and NDP'ers alike, strongly criticized Stephen Harper for being "too American" in his policies.  I wish in this case he was:  the Americans have a much stronger Marine Mammals Protection Act.  So, let us stop the posturing and dispense with the holier than thou attitude that Canadians are inherently a kinder and gentler nation.  
   
  I have copied an article written by Matthew Scully which recently appeared in The National Post.   I do hope you read it.  By the way, Mr. Scully is a former speech writer for George Bush.  Now if a Republican has the mettle to speak out against the slaughter, surely the NDP does as well.
   
  Best regards,
   
   
  An ivory trade to call our own
> Matthew Scully, National Post
> Published: Monday, February 13, 2006
> 
> Forming right now inside their mothers, seal pups
> will soon fill the ice
> floes off Newfoundland and Labrador. Then comes one
> of their very first
> sights on this Earth -- the swarms of men bearing
> clubs, hooks, guns, and
> knives. Welcome to the world.
> 
> Nature has its own ruthless ways, as those men like
> to remind us, and makes
> no special allowance for the young and helpless. But
> this annual killing
> binge is not of nature's design, and there has
> always been something
> uniquely abhorrent in the spectacle.
> 
> If we could understand what possesses people to do
> such things, and do it
> all with such smug self-assurance, the insight would
> have relevance far
> beyond Atlantic Canada. Their professed reasons -
> the marginal economic
> benefits of the hunt, the protection of an ancient
> "way of life," etc. -
> have never really explained it. When you've
> dispensed with all their
> excuse-making, it becomes clear we are dealing here
> with some deep and
> implacable force.
> 
> Cruelty is the endpoint of greed and other vices,
> and rarely done for its
> own sake. Yet in every age and every place, there is
> a certain type of man
> who glories in violence -- only more when the
> victims are helpless and
> innocent. There is "a cruelty that is fed, not
> weakened, by tears," as a
> long-ago philosopher observed. Whether this
> malevolence directs itself at
> humans or at animals, it all comes from the same
> rot, the same dark and
> unreachable place in the human heart.
> 
> I was struck last year by a letter to this paper
> from one seal-pup
> slaughterer who took offense at my use of
> "innocence." The word springs
> naturally enough to mind when one is attempting to
> describe newborn mammals
> left defenseless on the ice floes that are their
> nursery, creatures so new
> to the world they cannot swim and can barely crawl.
> But you can understand
> why someone who clubs, shoots, or skins alive
> hundreds of such creatures in
> an afternoon would find the term uncomfortable.
> 
> Twenty or so centuries' worth of Western literature
> and religious allusion
> has looked to young animals as the very embodiments
> of vulnerability and
> innocence, as in the Lamb who suffered for the sins
> of the world. And there
> is no reason to shy from plain moral language
> here as well. That same tradition left us with an
> abundance of other ideas
> such as humility before Creation, the moral
> restraint of the strong toward
> the weak, and the spirit of mercy that extends even
> to humble animals -
> ideas readily grasped by all except the perverse
> hard
> of heart.
> 
> There is a passage in The Heart of Darkness that has
> a familiar ring. If you
> substitute "sealskin" for "ivory," Joseph Conrad
> could be reporting directly
> from the ice floes: "The word ivory rang in the air,
> was whispered and
> sighed. A taint of imbecile rapacity blew threw
> it all, like a whiff from some corpse ... and
> outside, the silent wilderness
> surrounding this cleared speck of the earth struck
> me as something great and
> invisible, like evil or truth, waiting patiently for
> the passing away of
> this fantastic invasion."
> 
> A harsh but truthful portrait of the type -- of men
> who think that every
> last thing on Earth is there for the taking, and
> traipse about as if their
> only business in this world is to allocate death.
> 
> 
> More than anything else, what really amazes me about
> the seal-pup slaughter
> is the stubborn pridefulness of it: Let all the
> world think they are callous
> fools. Let nation after nation slam the doors on
> their stolen products, as
> Greenland, Denmark, and Italy have done in
> recent days. Let a worldwide boycott of Canadian
> fishery products destroy
> the markets and jobs of other people. For these
> folks, all of this is only
> more reason to set course toward the seal nurseries.
> 
> They talk a lot about traditional values and the
> like, as opposed to modern,
> "urban" values, and you wonder how many of these
> characters still like to
> think of themselves as good Christian men. Maybe by
> now, as I am told by
> witnesses to the mayhem, the pretenses have all
> pretty well fallen away. We
> can be certain, in any case, that even when the
> cameras are barred and the protesters kept away, no
> cruelty goes unrecorded,
> and no forsaken creature's whimper is beyond His
> hearing.
> 
> 
> If the Good Shepherd does indeed watch over those
> scenes, I would not want
> to be wearing their bloody boots.
> 
> Recall, too, that all of this cruelty is subsidized,
> propped up by millions
> of dollars a year from Canada's taxpayers. Yet all
> arguments were lost last
> time around on Prime Minister Paul Martin. Even to
> the very end, he could be
> heard pandering in Atlantic Canada during last
> month's election with pledges to "save the seal
> hunt."
> 
> So let it be a Conservative government that finally
> brings the wretched
> business to an end. It would be a fitting start for
> Prime Minister Stephen
> Harper, a courageous and merciful exercise of his
> new powers.
> 
> And to a watching world, no decision of his could
> more dramatically
> demonstrate that corrupt old ways will no longer be
> tolerated, and a new day
> has truly arrived in Ottawa.

  __________________________________________________


				
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