The campaign against the horrifically cruel slaughter of over 350,000 baby harp seals was given a boost this month by two editorials in the Canadian newspaper, the National Post.  We have included both in their entirety for you to read.

The National Post is considered to be the most conservative newspaper in Canada.

On January 5th, an opinion piece by Matthew Scully, a former speech writer for President George W. Bush, attacked the hunt and demonstrated that opposition to the seal hunt is not limited to tree-hugging left-wingers.

Click on the title to link directly to the editorial or, for your convenience, we have copied the editorial in its entirety below:

Canada's Cowardly Face

By Matthew Scully

National Post

January 05, 2005

When you are in the business of killing baby seals, it takes a strange turn of mind to think of yourself as a victim. Yet this is how Canada's seal-pup hunters have always wanted us to see them - as the victims of "propaganda," meddlesome "outsiders," unfair trade restrictions and other forces arrayed against the noble sealer. And now, as they prepare the boats, guns and clubs for another intrepid assault on the nurseries of the North Atlantic , they ask once again for our sympathy.

The hunters wait until the pups are weaned, at about 12 days, and left alone by their mothers on ice floes off the coasts of Newfoundland , Labrador and Prince Edward Island . If you were there before the sealers arrived in early spring, you would see great masses of pups huddled together, and hear their soft cries filling the air. In one of nature's own stern measures, the baby seals are calling for mothers who have left them forever.

John Efford, a Newfoundland MP and Canada 's Minister for Natural Resources, objects to the very term "baby seals" as sentimental propaganda. "It's absolutely wrong," he recently told The Globe and Mail. "It can't be any more wrong to say we're killing baby seals when we're not." Mr. Efford means by this that, instead of killing them in their first week on Earth, the sealers now restrain themselves until the second week, when the pups' winsome white fur has given way to a rougher, grayish coat. But of course, using "baby seal" in the normal, objective sense of an utterly defenseless newborn creature of that species, these are most assuredly baby seals.

In six weeks' time they would learn to fend for themselves. Instead, the men move in, welcoming the newborns into the world with clubs, hakapiks and hooks. With all the manhood - and less skill - that it would take to execute tens of thousands of frantic puppies or kittens, they go by boat and snowmobile from nursery to nursery. British and Canadian veterinarians, observing the scene in recent years, estimated that about 40 percent of victims are skinned alive. Uncounted others are "struck and lost," meaning shot and drowned.

Those who followed last year's hunt, which brought death to some 350,000 pups, will remember such typical scenes as one seal trying to escape as another is clubbed nearby; the creature makes it to water's edge but, too young to even swim, must wait there as the man with the club approaches. Other footage - seen across the world, however unfairly, as the face of Canada - showed sealers routinely dragging conscious pups across the ice with boat hooks, or shooting the seals and leaving them to suffer.

Yet standing there, ankle deep in gore and innocent blood, the sealers just can't understand why anyone would object. And we're all supposed to feel sorry for them, these fine, upstanding fellows so unappreciated by the modern world. Mr. Efford, back when he led Newfoundland 's fisheries department, demonstrated the mindset when he proposed to ban all cameras from the scene of the hunts - as if the problem were public knowledge of the event, rather than the event itself.

All involved are understandably averse to cameras. Before the films started airing in the 1970s, the rest of us knew little of seal nurseries or of seal hunting except from the colorful accounts of sealers themselves - much as we once knew nothing of whales and whaling except from the adventurous and self-serving accounts of whalers. The camera, in both cases, allowed all of humanity to witness the scene for ourselves. And this evidence, requiring no narrative or interpretation, has never squared with the proud and heroic self-image of the hunters.

What they have never faced up to is that the "propaganda" by which they feel so victimized consists of straight photographic documentation of what they do, and to whom they do it - the complete helplessness of the creatures an unanswerable rebuke to their slayers. What the sealers still dismiss as "cultural intolerance" is actually the natural and objective reaction of an overwhelming majority of people -- urban and rural, liberal and conservative, in Canada and beyond - who have not been desensitized to the cruelty and who have no money to gain from the mayhem.

Self-righteousness and self-pity are a fierce combination, however, and so in recent years the sealers - full-time fishermen who get about 5 percent of their income from the hunt - have found someone else who's been victimizing them: the seal.

The most obvious problem with the now-common claim that harp seals are depleting the North Atlantic cod population is that the seals were there for eons before our fishing fleets arrived, and cod remained plentiful. Marine biologists uniformly tell us that commercially fished cod comprise no more than 3 percent of a harp seal's diet. The seals eat squid, skate and other predators of cod, and so, in this and other ways, actually aid the fisherman if given a chance.

How do such elementary facts of marine science get brushed off? In a political version of the aquatic life chain, industrial fishing interests shift responsibility for their own excesses - the actual cause of cod depletion - on to provincial authorities. These authorities, in turn, have exerted pressure on Ottawa , which now basically pays for the seal hunt as a sort of supplementary-income program for the coastal communities harmed by industrial overfishing. Canadian taxpayers today actually subsidize seal processing plants, along with their government's efforts to peddle seal products abroad as trims, trinkets or useless "aphrodisiacs" for the Asian market.

In this way, the long-term interests of Atlantic Canada have been sacrificed to easy, short-term economics, and a perverse and destructive industry is artificially sustained. Meanwhile, U.S. restaurants, hotels and seafood distributors are preparing to boycott Canadian fish products, which will place many thousands of legitimate Canadian jobs at risk. A seafood and tourism boycott will be aided by a resolution now before the United States Senate to condemn the slaughter, should it be allowed to continue. It is a high cost to pay for the conduct of a cruel and prideful few.

Somehow, though, charges of "cruelty," "barbarism" and the like have never quite resonated with the sealers. Such terms have a plaintive, weepy ring that only plays into their image of "outsiders" as soft and over-refined, and of themselves as rugged and daring men. So this time around let us put the point more plainly, in terms they will understand: The problem with clubbing and skinning these most defenceless of creatures is not merely that it is merciless. The problem is that it is low, dishonourable and cowardly.

These men are forever telling us to take a hard, unsentimental look at the baby seals. They would do better to take a hard, unsentimental look at themselves for once, for their country's sake and for their own.

Matthew Scully served until recently as special assistant and deputy director of speechwriting to U.S. President George W. Bush. He is the author of Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy.; www.matthewscully.com

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The January 19 edition of the National Post carried an editorial entitled: End the Seal Hunt 

Click on the title to link directly to the editorial or, for your convenience, we have copied the editorial in its entirety below:

End the Seal Hunt 
National Post

January 19, 2005

Each year, mostly within a few spring days, hundreds of thousands of baby seals are killed in brutal and inhumane fashion off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador. This year's hunt should be the last, at least in its present form.

Advocates of the hunt have a tendency to dismiss opponents as being guided less by reason than emotion -- an irrational desire to protect seals over other, less-cuddly animals that are routinely slaughtered by the million for food. But there is a difference. The degree of cruelty inherent in the slaughter of defenceless baby seals -- an estimated 93% are less than a year old, and many are just days separated from their mothers -- is staggering, even next to what goes on in slaughterhouses.

A panel of veterinarians who observed the hunt in 2001 reported that as many as 42% of the seals whose carcasses they studied appeared to have been skinned while they were still conscious. Whereas the preferred manner to kill a seal is to render it unconscious with a single blow and then bleed it to death, live seals are often dragged across the ice by hooks before being skinned. In 40% of filmed cases studied by the same vets, injured animals were left on the ice after being clubbed once before hunters returned to hit them a second time. And that doesn't even include the seals that are shot by hunters but escape under the ice, where they die agonizing deaths.

Following the vets' damning report, which received considerable international attention, the federal government should have put an end to this macabre harvest. Instead, the seal hunt was expanded. In 2001, the seal quota was 275,000. But in 2003, Ottawa introduced a policy setting a three-year quota of 975,000 harp seals. Last year, 365,971 seals were killed; this year, that total could be even higher.

As Matthew Scully argued in these pages earlier this month, the standard defences of the seal hunt are unconvincing. The argument that the hunt is essential to the livelihoods of Newfoundland fishermen, for instance, is knocked down by the fact that it brings in little more than 5% of their annual income. Nor is there a particularly convincing case that, absent hunting, seals will ravage Atlantic Canada's remaining cod stock: Commercially fished cod comprise just 3% of seals' diet.

If curbing cruelty against animals is not its own reward, limiting the damage the seal hunt is doing to our international reputation should be. With images of seals being skinned alive having been broadcast around the world, the Humane Society of the United States -- which boasts roughly eight million members -- is spearheading efforts to prepare a U.S. boycott of Canadian fish products. Meanwhile, a U.S. Senate resolution expected to be reintroduced this year sharply urges the Canadian government to end the commercial seal hunt.

Opposition to the seal hunt is not limited to tree-hugging left-wingers. Mr. Scully, who has emerged as one of the most articulate anti-hunt voices, is a former speechwriter for George W. Bush. And last year, an Ipsos Reid poll showed that 71% of Canadians -- including 60% of Atlantic Canadians -- support either banning the hunt or limiting it to seals over one year of age.

Still, the federal government -- wary of losing voters in Newfoundland -- continues not only to allow the hunt in its present form, but to actively encourage it through subsidies. From the perspective of both our own moral standards and our international image, it's the wrong thing to do. Whether it is through an outright ban or sweeping restrictions that ensure humane standards, it's time for Ottawa to put an end to a barbaric form of hunting that has no place in the 21st century.