McCartney's seal campaign silly, Inuit say

Two Inuit leaders say pop star Paul McCartney's recent campaign against the Canadian seal hunt is silly and disrespectful to wildlife.

The ex-Beatle visited the East Coast region this month to stage a high-profile photo-op on the ice floes in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, calling for the end of the centuries-old commercial hunt. Sheila Watt-Cloutier, the elected Chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, and Duane Smith, president of the conference, say in a news release issued today that Ottawa should reject McCartney's advice. They are urging a federally funded campaign in Europe and the United States to counter his message.

Watt-Cloutier called McCartney "silly" for lying down on sea ice and playing with seal pups. She says seals may look like cute pets, but should be viewed as wild animals that are hunted by humans. "Inuit hunt seals for food and clothing, and we market internationally the by-products of our sustainable hunt. This is why attacking the commercial harvest on Canada's East Coast and attempting to destroy the market for seal products also affects the Inuit seal hunt in the Arctic," she said.

McCartney and his wife Heather were seen on their bellies close to newborn harp seals, insisting the annual East Coast seal hunt is a "stain on the character of the Canadian people." They also appeared on CNN's Larry King Live from Charlottetown.

Watt-Cloutier noted that wildlife groups and Ottawa have established that seals are not endangered, and the World Trade Organization allows unrestricted trade in most seal products. Smith added: "Our hunting is sustainable. It is the right of Inuit as an aboriginal people to continue hunting as we have always done."

Watt-Cloutier said if McCartney wants to save seals, he should help Inuit stop climate change that is destroying sea ice — the habitat of seals. She invited the pop star to visit the Arctic to learn what seal hunting means to Inuit.

The hunt, which started in the 1700s, is expected to open later this month off Prince Edward Island and around the Magdalen Islands.

The main hunt typically begins in April off Newfoundland. The most recent figures suggest the industry was worth between $15 million and $20 million annually and employed up to 10,000 people, most of them in Newfoundland.

Thursday, March 16th, 2006

Inuit Politicians Speak out as Pawns of the Canadian Government
Commentary from Paul Watson- Sea Shepherd

The March 13 edition of the Toronto Star has two Inuit politicians from the far North condemning Paul McCartney's visit to the harp seal nursery.

Once again the Canadian government is parading token Native people before the media in an attempt to draw a linl between the commercial mass slaughter of seals and traditional and indigenous people. This is part of a government plan to promote sympathy for the seal hunt by appealing toth public with lies.

Lie # 1 - The hunt is humane
Lie # 2 - The harp seals need to be killed to protect the Cod
Lie # 3 - The seal is an important source of income for poor people
Lie # 4 - Seals are killed by traditional native people - Indians and Inuit.

The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society rejects all these lies.

The biggest lie of all is the implication that the seals are humanely killed by Native people. There is not a single Native American Indian or Inuit employed in the Canadian commercial seal hunt.

The strategy behind this lie is revealed in this commentary:
Inuit Politicians Speak Out as Pawns of the Canadian Government
Commentary By Captain Paul Watson

Once again the Inuit of Northern Canada have been drafted into defending the commercial slaughter of seals in the March 13 edition of the Toronto Star.

Sheila Watt-Cloutier the chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference and Duane Smith, the President of the Conference have both denounced Sir Paul McCartney and Lady Heather Mills McCartney's visit to see the new born seals in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

The Inuit of Greenland have condemned the commercial seal hunt off Eastern Canada as an embarrassment to sealers. The commercial seal hunt does not employ any Native peoples. So why are Watt-Cloutier and Smith attacking Paul and Heather?

Because the Federal government has asked them to.

A few years ago in a talk in Iceland to a conference of whalers, the Canadian government representative was one Brian Roberts, a senior advisor to the Canadian Minister of Indian and Northern Affairs. Roberts gave an astonishing speech to the assembled delegates of whalers. In his address Roberts outlined specific strategies that commercial whalers can use to undermine anti-whaling campaigns, drawing from the heated debates on sealing and the fur industry in Canada.

"The first step was to neutralize the appeal of the animal protection lobby," Roberts said. "To accomplish this it was necessary to mount an equally emotionally powerful counter-appeal. This counter-appeal was based on the survival needs of aboriginal communities which depended upon the continuing taking of fur-bearing animals."

Roberts said that this lesson would be useful to the whalers in "your own efforts to deal with a poorly informed and emotional public, and with politicians seeking electoral approval from such publics." In other words, Roberts speaking on behalf of the government of Canada was openly saying that Native people should be used as politically correct and emotional arguments to win favor for commercial whaling.

His reference to the Canadian seal hunt being countered by promoting the plight of Native seal hunters was indicative of where he saw this going. There had not been a single Native Indian or Inuit involved in the notorious slaughter of seal pups on the Atlantic coast. It was exclusively a Norwegian owned industry employing white Newfoundlanders, Nova Scotians and Quebecois. Not a single protest had ever been mounted against Inuit seal hunters yet it was these Inuit seal-hunters that the government portrayed as the victims of the protestors. This was of course a long tradition.

The Hudson Bay Company began it by using Indians to gather furs for the fur trade. The Indians were cheated at every opportunity and the fur-bearing animals, especially the beaver were nearly exterminated. When the anti-fur movement rose up to defend the animals, the furriers hid behind their Native workers and cited racism and imperialism for interfering with a traditional trade. Of course commercial exploitation of furs on such a scale had never been a tradition of the Indians. But Indians are like everyone else when it comes to whoring for dollars so they eagerly jumped into the fray to accuse the protectors of beavers and wolves, foxes and mink of being racists.

Roberts continued. "If you want to go whaling commercially, unless you have your act together on.three questions, you're dead in the water," he said. The three questions concern: the status of the whale stock (endangered or not), the killing method. (humane or not) and whether the hunt is frivolous."

A few years ago when Canada was saying the European vote to ban harp seal pelts would harm the Inuit, Arnaituk M. Tarkirk from Kuujjuak in Northern Quebec wrote: "We have been hearing all about the European vote to ban the importation of seal products from the so-called seal hunt. I am an Inuk and I would like to say what I think about this Peter Ittinuur, Northwest Territory MP has been saying that this vote will put a lot of Inuit on welfare. This is stupid. The money from the hunt goes to Norway mostly and has nothing to do with the Inuit. We are skillful hunters who hunt adult animals for food, that is not the same as bashing a pup, which can't move, over the head. In fact if the seal hunt stopped, we would benefit the most. There would be 180,000 more seals left for us to eat when they are a few years older, and also people would not have such an aversion to sealskin products as they have after seeing the way they kill the pups, so craft work made with adult seals would be more popular. The Hudson Bay Company and the government are just using the Inuit to further their own purposes. I am surprised Peter Ittinuur, whom I know, could allow himself to be used like that. I know people who are against the seal hunt, and they are not against the Inuit. I am an Inuk, and I oppose the seal hunt."

This is the same reason the Inuit of Greenland and the government of Greenland have condemned the Canadian slaughter of hundreds of thousands of seal pups. They view it as an embarrassment and they believe that the association in the public eye between bashing seal pups in the head and seal fur has ruined their traditional markets.

Back in 1984, The Native Brotherhood of Canada openly accused me of racism for opposing the commercial hunt and accused me of forcing Native people into welfare and to become addicted to drugs and drink because we were interfering with their traditional livelihood. The accusation came from Jean Rivard, the President of the Association. I successfully sued him and he paid damages and apologized. He lost when I asked him before the judge just what native people were being forced out of work. He answered the native peoples of Newfoundland. I responded by informing him that the Beothuk people of Newfoundland were driven to extinction a century before by the very same people he was now defending - the white sealers of Newfoundland.

Now once again the government is drafting Inuit to defend the commercial seal hunt, an industry that does not employ a single native person. They are simply utilizing the strategy that Roberts had laid out to defend commercial whaling. Insist that it is humane, insist that the populations are not threatened and associate the industry with a traditional culture.

What was really insulting was when Sheila Watt-Cloutier accused Paul McCartney of being disrespectful of wildlife and said it was silly of him to pose with a baby seal. This was because these animals must only be considered as food and have no other use she implied.

Paul and Heather McCartney and I do not consider seals to be food. We are vegans. We believe that animals have a right to live happily on the Earth without fear and suffering at our hands.

Is this silly?

It seems to me to be a more respectful way of looking at animals than clubbing new born pups over the head or skinning them alive. And it certainly is more respectful than being a cheap public relations hack for the Canadian government's defense of the horrifically cruel, wasteful and unnecessary mass slaughter of hundreds of thousands of seal pups.

Paul McCartney was right when he said this slaughter is a stain on the character of the Canadian people. Why would the Inuit want to associate themselves with this stain. Many of them do not as illustrated by the letter from Arnaituk M. Tarkirk, an Inuk from Northern Quebec who is not a politician and opposes the seal hunt.