AR-News: (UK) Campaigner tells of seal-cull despair

[Animalara2003 at aol.com]

icWales

Apr 15 2004


Rhodri Clark, The Western Mail
 
THE Welshman who campaigned for two decades to bring an end to the culling of 
baby seals in Canada has spoken of his anguish over the resumption of the 
slaughter
In the 1980s, millions of people around the world responded to Brian Davies' 
appeal, which was illustrated with an emotive picture of a hunter dragging a 
fluffy seal pup over white ice and leaving a red trail of blood.
Killing white seals remains banned, largely as a result of Mr Davies's 
campaign, but now Canada is embarking on a mass culling of young seals which have 
just shed their white fur.
"I'm deeply disappointed," said Mr Davies, who grew up in Tonyrefail, Rhondda 
Cynon Taff, and now lives in Florida. "It took 19 years to stop the 
white-coat hunt. I think I will be dead before this one is stopped.



"It hurts me personally, but for about 13 years there was relative peace on 
ice, so I look back on that.
"We know that during those 13 years about 1.3 million seals weren't killed 
that otherwise would have been killed, so I'm glad I did what I did.
"Before the white-coat ban, when we went to the ice to film, we couldn't get 
near the adult seals. They would slip into the water.
"After seven or eight years, we started to see dramatic change because we had 
females giving birth who had never experienced a hunt.
"You could walk among them. They didn't slip into the water to get away from 
you. They would give birth with people watching. That's all been cast out. Go 
there now and you will have just terrified animals."



full story:

http://icwales.icnetwork.co.uk/0100news/0700world/tm_objectid=14148094&method=
full&siteid=50082&headline=campaigner-tells-of--seal-cull-despair-name_page.ht
ml 



“I personally cannot get overly worked up about the deprivation of human 
rights in a world where non-humans have no rights at all. Until animals and nature 
have rights, none of us have any rights at all because without animals, 
ecosystems and nature's diversity, rights are meaningless. Humans are a group that 
was never very successful to begin with. Overly territorial, obsessed with 
trivialities, violent, petty, and completely lacking in empathy for other 
species. The world would be a much nicer place without us." Captain Paul Watson 
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