Paul Watson: Canadian sealers get down to their bloody work

Paul Watson

ABOARD FARLEY MOWAT - We are now entering the 11th hour of the seal slaughter in the Gulf of St Lawrence.

The ice floes are flowing red with the blood of seal pups. The only good news today is that one sealing vessel has sunk and a few more have been damaged by the ice.

I thought it was amusing that when the Farley Mowat suffered a hull breach on March 6, some of the Canadian media reflected that this was due to our lack of seamanship. Yet when a sealer is sunk or damaged in the ice it's a tragedy. In other words the sympathies of many in the Canadian media lie with those who inflict pain and death for profit and not with those who are out here because of compassion for life.

Today we saw horrendous cruelty and slaughter as the Canadian Coast Guard and the Mounted Police stood guard over the sealers in an attempt to prevent us from filming and photographing the bloody carnage.

The authorities were alarmed that we pointed cameras at the sealers but when a sealer aimed a high powered rifle with scope at another crewmember and myself, the Mounties refused my request to order him to desist from aiming his weapon at us.

So aggressive were the Coast Guard that they narrowly missed ramming the Farley Mowat with their 300-foot icebreaker Amundsen. Only by going into full reverse was the Farley Mowat able to prevent the collision.

Despite the efforts by the Canadian government, the crew of the Farley Mowat have documented hours of excessive cruelty and slaughter.

This is absolutely the worst slaughter that I have seen in the Gulf of St Lawrence since the 1970s. Never before has there been over a hundred sealing ships in the Gulf waging bloody slaughter against the seal pups. The blood on the ice and the thousands of pathetic little corpses littering the ice are hauntingly sad and a vivid testament to the inhumanity of humankind.

We have not been arrested so far today. The government sees us as criminals for having the audacity to witness this despicable massacre armed with cameras. All around us, bullets are flying, clubs are smashing the heads of young mammals and the screams drift across the frozen floes as sealers strut about with spiked clubs and rifles.

Violence rules out here and the camera is detested because it has the power to capture these images and transmit them around the world to raise awareness about this Canadian obscenity.

The power of the Government's mad defence of this cruelty and killing is all around us. Two massive Coast Guard icebreakers, Coast Guard helicopters, Department of Fisheries aircraft.

The icebreaker Amundsen is now returning, crashing through the ice towards us again...