| coast that you don’t see--out of sight, out of mind--that’s fine. Heck, you can’t even take a seal off the ice and bring it on land in Canada and kill it in that manner. We have rules and regulations on how we’re meant to kill livestock. It’s somehow different when they’re on the ice. There’s something very wrong here.”
Barker said he decided to make Sealed Fate “to tell the story of what was really happening. There was rumor that it was hearsay. That it wasn’t real. That it wasn’t the baby seals—the whitecoats—that were being killed.”
“I wanted to be there directly at the birth of the seals,” he said, “which is the most extraordinary thing you’ve ever seen. It’s the largest mammalian migration on earth, greater than the wildebeests crossing the Serengeti. You have four million seals coming down from Greenland to this one area because they think it’s safe. Because it’s perfect, pristine ice, where their white coats will camouflage.”
Scenes in his documentary showed the ice stained with blood from the clubbings.
“My mission is really to educate people, because most people still don’t know that it’s going on and what’s happening out there. But I’m afraid it’s not enough just to be educated, for us as a group. We have to really start thinking outside the box.”
Barker praises an HSUS push for a boycott of Canadian seafood, onto which 5,500 restaurants and stores have signed so far.
“It’s having an enormous effect,” he said, because Canada exports two-thirds of its ocean catch to the U.S. “I’m part of that as well and I’ve started doing something called ‘Chefs for Seals.' I’m going around the country photographing the chefs of these major restaurants who’ve joined the boycott.”
“You have to hit them where it hurts,” he said of Canadian government proponents of the seal hunt. “And where it hurts is the pocketbook.”
For more on Nigel Barker's presentation to the TAFA conference please visit this page again in the coming days.
Disclosure: Animal Beat received a media pass from The HSUS to cover the Taking Action for Animals conference.
Katerina Lorenzatos Makris is the author of 17 novels for
publishers including Avon, E.P. Dutton, and Simon & Schuster, and
hundreds of articles for publications such as National Geographic
Traveler, San Francisco Chronicle, and Veggie Life. She wrote a
teleplay for CBS and short fiction for The Bark magazine. With coauthor
Shelley Frost, she wrote Your
Adopted Dog
(The Lyons Press). Holding a B.A. in Environmental Science Studies and
a lifelong interest in animal issues, she spends a lot of her time
battling a severe addiction to dogs.
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