This is a letter that I wrote to the CBC on their biased coverage of the
seal slaughter.  May I suggest others to the same?

John D

To Whom It May Concern,

I am shocked at what I perceive to be slanted coverage of the seal "hunt"
issue.

Why is it that when protesters are assaulted and subsequently arrested for
their calls to the RCMP for help; the coverage is way down the priority
list under National coverage?

And then when this same assaulter, is threatened verbally, the issue gets
front page coverage on your website?

I am originally from Toronto, and lived for a while in Halifax.  Now I am
in New Zealand and Canadian students like myself are getting a lot of flak
about this admittedly barbaric policy that is validated by the Canadian
government and now the corporate media.

How does the CBC claim credibility and objectivity, with such a deficit of
balance?  How do you plan to remedy this situation?

I'm going to include an email and ask that you read the accounts of
friends that were participants in the protest.  Clearly their lives were
threatened by the those facilitating this spectacle (the sealers, the
coast guard and the RCMP).  So why do those circumstances not warrant
coverage (besides the "Shots Fired" article) and the remote telephone
threats to a sealer get top priority?

I know the animal rights movement has not taken root in Canada to the
extent that it has in Europe or here in New Zealand; but where does the
CBC take responsibility in informing Canadian civil society about animal
welfare issues, assaults on protesters by the Canadian Coast Guard and
sealers and providing balanced coverage.  Your unbalanced coverage
marginalises protesters and puts their lives further at risk, when the
RCMP, Coast Guard and Sealers feel empowered enough, and unaccountable
enough to break the law.  Such an imbalance also serves to discredit the
animal rights movement and leaves Canadians ill informed about issues that
are relevant on the global stage.

The other Canadian students here were really shocked at how internationals
view the seal slaughter, and subsequently Canadians themselves.  They were
fairly uninformed about the issue, as they didn't have the personal emails
that I have.

Please make the CBC more balanced and less anthropocentric in its coverage
so that "blogs" aren't the only source of information people have to turn
to for these very important issues.


"The whole world is watching"

John David Price

Police investigate death threats against sealer
Last Updated Wed, 06 Apr 2005 19:15:46 EDT



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Photos of injured seal defenders:
http://shepherd.textamerica.com/

From: "Farley Mowat"

Attack of the Hak-a-Piks
Sea Shepherd Crew Assaulted by Sealers then Arrested by Fisheries Officers


Farley Mowat Update

March 31st, 2005
2300 Hours Atlantic Standard Time
1900 Hours Pacific Standard Time

Position:

46 Degrees 40 Minutes 467 Seconds North
61 Degrees 45 Minutes 669 Seconds West
15 Miles off Prince Edward Island.


Tonight the Farley Mowat is locked into the ice. We must go where the
ice takes us and it has moved us some fifty miles from the point close to
the agdalen Islands where we were when the storm moved in. The ice
pressure continues to build.

Of the nearly one hundred sealing ships that were in the ice on March
29th, only about 30 vessels remain. Two have sunk, others have been
abandoned and others have been damaged, their hulls being squeezed by the
increasing pressure. Most have returned to port. One Newfoundland sealer
was overheard to say on the radio, "these
seals ain't worth this trouble b'ye."

The radio was alive with desperate sealers calling for help from the Coast
Guard. But one Coast Guard ice breaker was busy elsewhere. They dropped
all their other activities to respond to a complaint from the Newfoundland
sealer Brady Mariner that some Sea Shepherd crew were taking pictures of
their activities.

At 1330 Hours, 16 crew from the Farley Mowat had crossed a mile of ice to
witness and document sealing activities by the Brady Mariner. Eight
sealers came towards them armed with hak-a-pics and began to shout and
swear at them. Within minutes the sealers became violent and attacked the
Sea Shepherd crew. Lisa Moises 19 from Germany was slapped in the face and
punched in the stomach by one burly sealer. Another attacked photographer
Ian Robichaud with a hak-a-pik, striking his camera and hitting him in the
side of the head. Adrian Haley was struck in the face. Jonathan Batchlor
was punched in the mouth. Jonny Vasic was hit in the side of the head with
a club. Petite Lisa Shalom of Montreal was struck by a sealer as she took
pictures of the assault on her crewmates. When another sealer swung his
hak-a-pik to strike Jonny Vasic's camera, Dr. Jerry Vlasak, a surgeon from
Los Angeles, jumped in his way and took the blow across the face.

The crew radioed back to Captain Paul Watson that they had been attacked.
Captain Watson called the Coast Guard Icebreaker Amundsen and requested
that the Mounted Police officers on Board investigate the assault. They
did not reply.

Instead a helicopter was dispatched to arrest the Sea Shepherd crew on the
ice. Of the 16 who left to document the sealers, only seven were able to
return. They barely made it. The Amundsen was charging through the ice to
cut off their path of retreat to the Farley Mowat.

Lisa Moises and Ian Robichaud barely made it back to the Farley Mowat.
They watched as the massive red hull of the Coast Guard Icebreaker
Amundsen bore quickly down on them in an attempt to cut them off. They
could see chunks of ice flying out from the bow of the ice breaker but
they kept focused on the Farley Mowat and managed to make it across.

Behind them Jonny Vasic and Jon Batchelor raced to cross the ice before
the Amundsen could cut them off. Jonny saw the hull looming above him and
felt the ice tremble as a jagged cut slithered before the bow and opened
up. He could see the dark black water widening as he jumped and made it
across, relieved to see that Jon Batchelor had done the same. Both of them
raced towards the Farley Mowat.

Behind them Alex Cornelissen and Lisa Shalom were not so lucky. They were
cut off and unable to cross the treacherous lead that the Amundsen had
opened up. They saw helicopters approaching and police officers debarking
the Ice breaker, their hands on their guns approaching them. The eleven
captured were manhandled into helicopters and taken to the Amundsen and
charged.

The Amundsen then came towards the Farley Mowat in an intimidating manner
and stopped only a few hundred feet off the starboard side of Farley Mowat
for over an hour. No one on the Amundsen said anything or would provide
information on the crew they had taken into custody. Captain Watson spoke
with the Mounted Police in Charlottetown and officially requested an
investigation into the assault charges. The entire assault was documented
on the crew's video cameras.

The fate of the eleven arrested crew is uncertain. They have all vowedto
refuse bail and to refuse food. The eleven represent five different
nationalities They are Dr. Jerry Vlasak, Colin Biroc and Andre Casanave of
California, Megan Southern and Ian Fritz of Arizona, Ryan Goyette of Rhode
Island, Matt Schwartz of Texas, Lisa Shalom of Montreal, Quebec, Alex
Cornelissen from the Netherlands, Peter Hammarstedt of Sweden and Laura
Dakin, an Australian citizen and resident of Bermuda.

Assaulted with a deadly weapon, injured and then arrested and all this
because they attempted to take a picture of a sealer viciously
slaughtering a baby seal.

You can almost smell the bananas growing in Canada these days. What kind
of a democracy makes it a crime to take a photograph or shoot film of a
wildlife slaughter? What kind of democracy responds to an assault by
arresting the victim? What kind of nation prides itself in the mass
massacre of hundreds of thousands of baby animals? What kind of government
demands that permits be picked up in the one place where the applicants
will be assaulted and where there is a history of violent assaults against
them? What kind of nation could irresponsibly send ill-equipped vessels
into treacherous ice conditions so that seals can be slaughtered?

The chaos that has erupted in the Gulf of St. Lawrence this week - the
sinking of sealing vessels, the numerous distress calls, the assaults, and
the arrests illustrate yet once again that the Canadian Department of
Fisheries and Oceans is an incompetent bureaucracy. It is the same
incompetence that led to the collapse of the cod fishery, the same
incompetence that led to charges of dumping waste by DFO vessels in
Halifax harbor and the same incompetence that is mismanaging and
threatening the harp and hood seal populations.

The DFO officers have turned a blind eye to the cruelty and the violations
by sealers for decades. They have fixated on protecting the killers from
the eyes of the world and they have demonstrated that they have lost all
sense of objectivity and balance in their approach to ocean resource
issues.

Fourteen crew remain on the Farley Mowat. Eleven are being held prisoner
on the Amundsen. The seal slaughter has ended it's third day in the Gulf.
Tomorrow morning will be the fourth day of this circus of blood, gore and
violence by the arrogantly ignorant. Yet we are still here - the guardians
and defenders of the seals and here we will remain until our ship is sunk
or driven out or we are captured or die out here on the ice doing what we
came here to do - to be shepherds to these young and beautiful creatures -
the harp seals.