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BABY SEALS
Everywhere in the world, never-ending agony
The seemingly slow pace of evolution and progress in matters of animal protection is mind boggling. A painful file illustrates this sad remark, that of the baby seals.
Back in 1969, the first pictures of the martyrdom of baby seals beaten at Spring time every year on the Canadian coast are published in France.
From 1976 onwards, Brigitte Bardot joined Brian Davis, of the IFAW association, amongst others, and launched a huge international campaign to denounce the awful massacre of Canadian baby seals.
This traditional slaughtering which is carried out and organised by Canada, Norway and inhabitants of coastal regions (Newfoundland, Magdalen Islands) was officially set, that very year, for “129 999 seals”.
The methods employed to respect these “quotas” of very young victims in the Far North are inconceivably cruel. Blinded by their trust in the human being, the 15 day old baby seals are easily approached by hunters. They are then savagely beaten out of their senses with enormous clubs and cut up directly, despite the fact that some are still alive, in front of the very eyes of other small ones that are to be massacred only moments later. The tragedy is witnessed by powerless mothers that often stay for days next to the small one weltering in its blood, deprived of its fur and abandoned on the ice by its murderers; they try to warm up the naked corpse and feed it…
A demonstration led by Mrs. Bardot in front of the Norwegian embassy and many broadcast programmes stirred the opinion but was not sufficient enough to reason the culprits who were responsible for the slaughtering.
The year after, on March 14th 1977, Brigitte Bardot set out for the very same campaign to stop the massacre of baby seals which was thriving more than ever (185 000 “programmed” victims) and flew to the “scene of the crime” accompanied by Franz Weber, the famous protector of animals, amongst others. For 5 days and in extremely difficult conditions, Mrs. Bardot and her team outdid themselves in intrusions and denunciations to urge the trappers to give up their ominous activity.
On March 15th, first day in the midst of the horrifying journey, while the Canadian government was doing its utmost to hold back the arrival of the defenders of the martyrs at the Blanc Sablon camp (scene of the crime), President Giscard d’Estaing forbade the import of seal skin back in France: a rare but most welcome piece of news.
On March 28th 1983, the European Union set a ban on the import of white and blue seal skin and fur.
Unfortunately, the nightmare of the seals does not end there and then. They are not safe in other areas of the world.
Indeed, Russia seems to supersede Canada in the awful massacre.
The slaughter of millions of baby seals on the coasts of the White Sea is revealed in May 1990 and resumed by the press from 1993 onwards. This time it is a real gulag: the “Pomors”, a Russian people from an unknown hamlet in Koïda, swipe out around 18 000 seals every year in March/April to feed off from and above all to sell their fur.
Most baby seals are not massacred immediately: they are tied up, wrenched away from the ice floe by helicopter and left to starve in “death camps” for 2 or 3 weeks, until they start moulting. They are then cut up. This is morally and financially supported by the State, which of course drains subsequent profits from the whole operation.
Mrs Bardot pointed an indignant finger at this new scandal in a long and violent interview for Paris Match in 1990. Three years later the Brigitte Bardot Foundation launched a petition of protest for the Russian Ambassador.
At the same time, our President endeavoured to initiate a dialog with Boris Eltsine but her efforts were vain. No answer came back, despite the thousands of signatures that were gathered for the occasion.
While the Soviet State kept an obstinate silence, heavy with meaning for the unfortunate seals of Koïda, the endless agony inflicted to those animals emerged from other parts of Russia: international press reported “new” barbarous hunts on the Caspian Sea coasts. The Russian, Kazak and Azeri people undertake a ritual bloodshed at the end of Winter, ruthlessly slaughtering 30 000 seals in 2 weeks. The seals are still babies and their massacre is fulfilled for the same lucrative and futile reasons: fur (and aphrodisiacs ; in other words nothing vital).
On either side of the Volga river, the seals had hoped to find a blissful haven to reproduce themselves and live far away from human cruelty… No technical progress to at least repress some of the pain endured by the victims: Canadian bludgeons are too much trouble for the Russians who prefer using the blood-spattered corpse of an unconscious baby to beat up an other!
Brigitte Bardot insisted on a meeting with Mr. Ryjov, ambassador of the country, and entrusted him with a letter to President Eltsine (who, by the way, as previously, still did not answer).
The denunciation of this monstrous massacre added on to the last one and others will still occur as approximately 80 000 seals are slaughtered every year in the ex-USSR.
The annual quota of massacred seals in Canada has increased from 129 999 in 1996 to 350 000 in 2003.
After a moratorium that lasted 15 years, the amount of authorized seal captures has gone up to over a million for 2003, 2004, 2005… They are clubbed down with pickaxes, bludgeons…
The Canadian authorities approximate the population of seals in Greenland to 5 million today against 10 million in 1990 and erroneously blame them for threatening the existence of stocks of fish in the Atlantic Ocean when the real culprits are industrial fleets that rampage through seas and oceans.
After the US, the European Union has taken steps to forbid importing and trading baby seal skin (directive 83/129/CEE), but confronted to the soaring amount of massacres, some member States would like to go even further.
Belgium, Austria and Germany voted bills these last months to set a ban, in every country, on skin and fur imports of adult seals. Italy is working on such a bill, which would also include a ban on fat and oil imported from seal hunts.
France has to take measures to condemn a slaughter that sickens everyone.
On May 10th 2004, the Brigitte Bardot Foundation met President Chirac to request a ban on all products coming from seal hunting (skin, fat, oil…)
Over 30 years of never-ending struggle against this vileness, symbol of ghastly horrors perpetrated all over the world against animals, to review the same unbearable pictures of a universal slaughter... It is nevertheless necessary to speak up and denounce, protest and demonstrate so that one day wisdom may finally take over guilty unawareness of an atrociously destructive human nature.
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