Russia Bans Baby Seal Massacre, Canada Continues Killing Spree

Baby seals are safe from being massacred in Russia, as the country announced Wednesday that it had banned hunting the animals. The announcement came weeks after Prime Minister Vladimir Putin called it a “bloody industry”.  Anti-seal hunting protesters had gathered in 20 cities and towns across Russia this week to urge a halt to the practice.

From Reuters:

“The bloody sight of the hunting of seals, the slaughter of these defenseless animals which you cannot even call a real hunt, is banned in our country, just as well as in most developed countries, and is a serious step to protect the biodiversity of the Russian Federation,” the minister for natural resources, Yuri Trutnev, said in a statement.

Seals inhabit Russia’s White Sea region in the Arctic. As in Canada and Norway, hunters target the fluffy baby seals — also known as “whitecoats” for their highly valued snow-white fur — in early spring and club thousands to death.

Meanwhile, the annual Canadian baby seal killing extravaganza is set to begin later this month. Green Daily gives us some gruesome details:

I mean, how can sealers still be allowed to:

* “hunt” a couple hundred thousand baby seals
* use a club like a caveman (i.e. hit them with a big blunt stick)
* only half kill them
* strip the skins off their painfully still-breathing bodies, and
* sell each pelt for a rocking $30 — Canadian dollars, to add insult to injury!

Btw, did I mention that hunters kill the baby seals? In front of the mother seals? Often the seal pups are just a few weeks old, and some haven’t even been in the water. Apparently that soft baby fur is what rich old ladies and vain men like best.

So, what can you do to help? Sign this online PETA petition and then join celebrity chef Cat Cora in boycotting Canadian seafood to send Canada the message that we won’t tolerate the continuation of this cruel practice. Sign a pledge at the Humane Society of the United States and then get as many of your friends and family to sign as you can. The person who gathers the most signatures will win a visit to New York City to hang with Cat and have your photo taken by photographer Nigel Barker of America’s Next Top Model.

Learn more about the killing of these innocent, fluffy, ridiculously cute animals at the Humane Society’s ‘Protect Seals 2009’ website.

Link [Reuters] + [Green Daily] + [HSUS]
Photo credit: HSUS, MyPointIs.net

Protected Gray Wolves Being Illegally Killed

Hunters in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Wisconsin and the Rockies are still shooting down gray wolves despite the animal’s protected status. More than three dozen have been illegally killed in the U.P. within the past five years, and officials in other north central and Rocky Mountain states report many more wolf shootings. About 10 percent of Rockies wolves are killed illegally every year. The gray wolf was given legal protection after being nearly driven to extinction in many areas.

From MSNBC:

Some residents of the sprawling, rural Upper Peninsula deeply resent the wolf’s presence. Among them are hunters who believe the wily predators are decimating the whitetail deer herd and farmers who have lost livestock to wolf raids.

“They’re born killers,” said Al Clemens, a hunter from Ironwood who has lobbied state legislators to establish wolf hunting and trapping seasons. “… People are just fed up.”

Yes, wolves eat deer, but not enough to put a serious dent in the total, Roell said.

“Wolves are an easy scapegoat,” he added.

The wolf isn’t universally despised in the region. The DNR says a 2005 survey indicated most residents were willing to peacefully coexist. In fact, tips from citizens have been instrumental in nabbing poachers.

Still, most cases go unsolved, and many illegal kills undoubtedly never come to official attention. “Yoopers,” as Upper Peninsula residents call themselves, even have a catch phrase for dispatching a wolf and hiding the evidence: “Shoot, shovel and shut up.”

Gray wolves had disappeared from Michigan’s Lower Peninsula by the early 20th century and were nearly gone from the Upper Peninsula by 1960, when a state bounty program was repealed. But numbers have grown again and the U.P. population is now estimated at about 520. Wisconsin has about 540, while Minnesota (where the wolves are listed as ‘threatened’, not endangered) has approximately 3,000. In the Rockies, the population is about 1,500.

Due to this rebound in numbers, the government removed the animals from the endangered species list, but outraged conservationists believed the wolves were still vulnerable and a federal judge restored the wolves to the list in September.

Hunters and farmers who break the law and are caught by investigators often use the excuse that they “thought it was a coyote”. But wolves are twice as large as coyotes and make entirely different sounds.

It’s one thing to humanely kill wolves that are habitually stealing and killing livestock and pets, but it’s another entirely to decimate the population. People don’t seem to understand the fact that wolves exist in this region for a reason – they’re an essential part of the ecosystem. In fact, gray wolves are the only natural predators of coyotes in most of these areas and without them, coyote populations will swell. That’s nature, folks.
Link [MSNBC]
Photo credit: PETA

Canada Chooses to Kill Over 500 Narwhals Rather than Save Them

Once a year, Canada uses powerful icebreakers so hunters can gleefully kill thousands of baby seals and sell their downy white pelts. And yet, somehow those same icebreakers weren’t available when over 500 narwhals – whales with tusks resembling the horn of the fabled unicorn – became trapped under the ice. Instead of rescuing the whales, local hunters began killing them by shooting into the ‘blow holes’ where the animals surface to breathe.

From CBC News via Treehugger:

Elders and wildlife officials have agreed that the whales would otherwise die from starvation and a lack of oxygen as the sea ice closes in around them.

Hunters in Pond Inlet, a mainly Inuit hamlet of about 1,300, say they’ve been turning down requests from media outlets to fly into the community and cover the hunt.

Jayko Allooloo, chairman of the hunters and trappers organization in Pond Inlet, told CBC News that his group does not want cameras capturing images of whale carcasses laying about, in case some viewers think the hunters are wasting meat and blubber, also known as muktaaq.

Meanwhile, the organization that manages wildlife in Nunavut is defending the Pond Inlet hunters’ decision to kill all the trapped narwhals in what DFO has called a “humane hunt.”

“Those groups or individuals who are making these accusations, or trying to come up with ways to prevent this kind of incident [from happening], have to be aware this is a northern climate. It’s a harsh country,” said Harry Flaherty, acting chairman of the Nunavut Wildlife Management Board.

Narwhals are not officially listed as endangered, but they should be – experts say they’ll be greatly impacted by climate change, even more so than polar bears. Experts have said that narwhal hunting is not sustainable. Hunters in Pond Inlet are only supposed to kill up to 130 narwhals a year.

Treehugger notes that the DFO claims the noise from the icebreakers would have been too stressful for the narwhals. Yeah, because loud noise is really less stressful than seeing your family members killed right before you get shot yourself. That makes a lot of sense. How incredibly sad and sickening.

Link [CBC] via [Treehugger]
Photo credit: National Geographic

Sarah Palin’s Record on the Environment? Not so great.

We all know that Republican VP pick Sarah Palin questions global warming science and favors drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. But after last night’s Vice Presidential debate in which Palin’s answer to a direct question about climate change was vague to say the least (see below), we thought we’d give her environmental record another look.

Palin in response to climate change question in the VP debate:

I’m not one to attribute every man — activity of man to the changes in the climate. There is something to be said also for man’s activities, but also for the cyclical temperature changes on our planet.

But there are real changes going on in our climate. And I don’t want to argue about the causes. What I want to argue about is, how are we going to get there to positively affect the impacts?

We have got to clean up this planet. We have got to encourage other nations also to come along with us with the impacts of climate change, what we can do about that.

[Trascript via New York Times]