The images in the following program are highly sensitive and may be as disturbing to viewers as they were to us. However, we have to show the truth about cruelty to animals, praying that you will help to stop it.

The sealers go out onto the ice-floes. And at the time the seal pups are born and they’re helpless; they can’t swim, they can’t get away. And they simply club them over the head and skin them. And sometimes they’ve skinned them alive. We’ve seen that.

This is the Stop Animal Cruelty series on Supreme Master Television where today we present part one of a two-part series about the merciless brutality of the Canadian seal hunt. Two experts will share with us their personal experiences of witnessing the mass murder of baby seals in their nurseries.

Ian Robichaud, the founder of Harpseals.org, is dedicated to putting a permanent end to seal hunts. Using mass media and grassroots activism, Harpseals.org seeks to raise awareness about the atrocities committed by the seal industry. Since 2006, Supreme Master Ching Hai has provided the courageous group with donations totaling US$30,000 to further its mission.

Captain Paul Watson, a co-founder of Greenpeace International, and the founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society as well as the recipient of the prestigious Shining World Hero Award from Supreme Master Ching Hai has devoted the past 30 years to protecting and defending marine life, including seals.

Over 90% of the seal hunt occurs off the coastline of Newfoundland in Canada. And then there is another small area called the Magdalen Islands, and they’re in Quebec (Canada). So this is all around the Gulf of St. Lawrence in eastern Canada. But the majority of it happens on the outer coast of Newfoundland every year in the springtime.

So where are the harp seals born?

The harp seals are actually born on the ice. They’re one of the few species of animals that literally needs sea ice to be born on for their nursery. So they literally give birth on the ice. And the ice can be, depending on the weather conditions, either sometimes very close to the shorelines of, say, Prince Edward Island or some of these islands that are in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence or the shorelines of Newfoundland, or it can be literally a hundred miles offshore. So the seals go to wherever the ice is, and the sealers follow them.

The seals are only tiny babies, as young as two to three weeks old when the sealers head out in their boats to begin the massacre. When the time is right, when the white fur of these baby seals starts to molt off, which occurs after about two weeks, that’s when the Coast Guard sends the big Coast Guard cutters and the sealers literally, like little ducks following a big mother duck, they follow him right to the places where they can literally jump off their boats onto the ice, and then they just run up. They have cleated ice boots that give them traction, and they run up and club them. They also shoot the seals as well.

We’ve heard that one of the tools used is something called a hakapik, is that correct?

It’s a really brutal, grisly thing. It’s more or less a baseball bat with a hook on one side. And what the hook is for, they whack the seal on the head. They club them, okay, with this, basically again, it’s a long wooden stick, and it’s got a piece of metal on the end of it. Some of them do they have a little chunk of metal on it, but then on the other side, there is like a pick, so once the seal is whacked on the head and skinned, they’re usually skinned pretty much right there.

But then they use that pick part for dragging the seal carcass to the boat. They actually skin the seals pretty much right there where they club them and then they take that hakapik, it’s really a dragging tool, so they don’t actually club the seals with the pointed part, but it’s basically a club. It’s a very vicious, horrible instrument, and, and they use it quite pronouncedly.

In what other way are the seals killed?

Well, the other way is by gun. They use rifles. Whether they use a gun or a hakapik depends on the conditions or whether their boats are able to maneuver between the leads in the cracks in the ice. Some years, the ice is so compact that the boats are lucky to get pretty close to the seal herds, and then basically the sealers jump off, and they can literally walk by foot.

They can run around within a quarter mile from their boat in all directions, and they club them with the hakapiks. When they can’t get them with the hakapiks, they’ll shoot them, and again it depends on how closely those boats can maneuver. Because some years, like I said, that ice chunk, they’re literally little chunks of ice floating around, and it would be very dangerous for a sealer to try to jump on a little chunk of ice because he’d have to basically be jumping over open leads of ice.

So what they do in that case is they shoot them. But they prefer to hakapik them, and the reason why is because it keeps the pelt price at a higher value. A bullet hole in the wrong spot of a seal pelt will cause it to have a reduced value. And sometimes they’re shooting these seals from a hundred yards, 75 yards.

You can’t get a clean shot, so a lot of the seals have holes in their backs and the sides of their heads. The shot itself doesn’t even kill the seal, and the seal will actually slither off, and go into an open lead of the ice and literally slip under the ice and die.

Can the baby seals escape?

When they’re super young, when they’re first born, they don’t have enough layer of blubber yet. They’ll actually feed profusely on their moms’ milk for about the first two weeks. If they do happen to slip into the water, they’ll get hyperthermia. Most of the seals killed are literally between two weeks and about three months. Most of these guys are so young, they don’t know what’s coming at them. There is no natural predator that still exists, (Right.) except for human beings out there.

So what happens is these hunters walk right up to them, and I don’t even call them hunters by the way; I would like to retract that word; they’re killers. Because they walk, literally walk right up to an innocent baby seal, and the little seal raises up its little head, like he doesn’t know what’s going to happen, and the guy just whacks him right on the head. It’s a brutal thing; I’ve seen it close-up.

And the sealers show absolutely no mercy; it’s vicious and unbelievable. I can’t describe it; it’s horrible. If you’ve seen the pictures, you know it’s really, really horrific, but no mercy is shown.

Is the mother around during this and what is her reaction?

Yes. The killing of the seals is in the nursery, so the mothers are there present when the babies are killed! It’s one of the most heartless hunts if you can call it a ‘hunt’, anywhere in the world.

Well, the mother is around. All the seals don’t give birth exactly at the same time. They give birth over the course of about a month and a half to two months even. Most of them happen all within about a month, So, there’s some mother seals that will be nursing their baby “whitecoat,” whereas another mother seal might have given birth, say, two weeks earlier, where her baby has now molted and become legally “clubbable.”

They actually molt that beautiful white, famous fur into it’s called a “beater” stage, but where they literally look like little baby silver leopards; they’re really, really beautiful. And that is when the Canadian government legally classifies them as adult seals, even though they’re a month old, three weeks old, and that is when they’re “clubbable”

They don’t actually club the seals for their white fur anymore; they used to. But there’s been a ban on the white coats since 1983. But as soon as that fur starts to molt, they kill them. They are in fact being killed in front of mothers that are very, very nearby. So, it might be that the mother doesn’t know that her baby is being killed, but another mother 20 feet away, (Is watching.) will be able to see this.

They call it a ‘hunt’, but really it’s just a slaughter, a massacre of these animals. And fortunately, on the Canadian seal hunt side of it, we’ve gotten the European Parliament to ban seal pelts and that’s significantly lowered the number of seals that are being killed. But you know, this is the 21st century, there’s no reason for clubbing these animals over their head for their pelts. Whales, seals, fish are more valuable in the oceans than they are, being used by us.

What they do is maintain the integrity of oceanic ecosystems and the message that we’re trying to get across is that if the oceans die, then we die. My name’s Captain Paul Watson with The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.
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Many thanks Ian Robichaud and Captain Paul Watson and the members of your respective organizations for passionately working to end the seal slaughter. Bloodshed and violence has absolutely no place in our world and you are both model examples of love and kindness to animals. To halt sealing and other forms of animal exploitation, may we always say “NO” to all animal products.

For more information on these seal protection organizations, please visit the following websites: Harpseals.org - www.Harpseals.org
Sea Shepherd Conservation Society - www.SeaShepherd.org

Please join us next Tuesday on Stop Animal Cruelty for the conclusion of our program on the Canadian seal hunt. Thank you for your presence on today’s show. Coming up next is Enlightening Entertainment, after Noteworthy News. May we forever live in peaceful harmony with all animals.