Harp Seal Hunt - Canada’s Annual Spring Slaughter

By David Nickarz

In Winnipeg, the snow is melting and the roads are getting sandy and dirty in the process. At this time last year I was in the Gulf of St. Lawrence on the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society ship the Farley Mowat. We took our ship from warm Bermuda to the ice to observe the Canadian seal hunt.

Every year, Canada allows the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of seal pups under three months old to be brutally killed for the fur trade. The seals in the first part of the hunt are as young as three weeks old—they cannot swim and haven’t eaten solid food yet.

Thousands of off season fishermen come out to bash their heads in with long poles with hooks on the end. Sometimes they don’t waste their effort and just hook the seal in the head and drag it across the ice. The two times that I’ve seen the hunt first hand, there were seals skinned alive.

The anger that I feel towards the sealers is sometimes overwhelming. That anger can be kept inside, but that’s really not good for you. After witnessing the seal hunt in 2005, I came home with a mild case of post-traumatic stress. I couldn’t talk about what I saw. I would burst into tears when my lover asked me why I was acting strange.

Later that year I had to deal with cancer. Now before you accuse me of saying ‘the seal hunt gave me cancer’—it didn’t. There are many factors which caused my cancer, including my sedentary lifestyle and environmental toxins like pesticides. I’m happy to say that I’m getting to the gym a few times a week and I no longer chase pesticide-spewing trucks around anymore.

I was on the seal hunt with the Sea Shepherds again last spring. We watched a sealer calmly slice open a seal pup while it struggled its best to get away. Those of us on the bridge of the Mowat were shocked into silence. The seal hunt is much worse than any picture that I can show you, any video or any statistics could ever tell.

We then learned that four sealers had died while being towed by the Canadian Coast Guard. The crew was genuinely shocked at the news. Our shock was then tempered by the memory of watching that seal suffer a horrible, torturous death at the hands of those same men who died.

How do you have sympathy for men who spent their lives practicing such cruelty? I certainly wouldn’t like to die like they did, but that’s where our compassion for the dead sealers ended.

The media and sealers asked Paul to stop our protests to respect the sealers who died. Paul said that the seal hunt wasn’t stopping for their deaths, and that the deaths of the sealers was tragic, but the deaths of hundreds of thousands of baby seals was more tragic. He also called the sealers ‘cigarette smoking, club wielding thugs’.

Those comments came out while the ship was parked in St. Pierre, a French island just south of Newfoundland. The fishermen there didn’t take kindly to those comments and came out to cut our ship adrift. The Gendarmarie watched as one of their citizens hacked our mooring lines off with an axe. We scrambled to get the engine started and left St. Pierre, minus our gangplank.

----------------------------------

This year I’m not getting involved much in the seal hunt issue. The European Union are about to enact a ban on all seal products. The sealers themselves have said that a ban would shut down their industry. This is very good news.

The seal hunt won’t be stopped with kind words or compassion towards the fishermen who wield clubs. History has shown that you have to make the hunt economically unfeasible with boycotts and bans. The hunt is already being subsidized by twice as much as it’s worth in sales. The Canadian government will be stubborn, but we’re much more numerous and stubborn ourselves.

Let me be clear about how I feel about the sealers that will be impacted by the hunt ending. I don’t care where you get your one or two thousand dollars of blood money every year. I don’t care if ten generations of your family have slaughtered seals. You can cry foul and accuse us of cultural prejudice all you like.

My compassion lies solely with the Harp Seal. When that community doesn’t have to deal with the ice being bloodied with their young every year then I will celebrate.

Whales are not forever

Engineer’s Blog
David Nickarz, tenth engineer
Monday, February 9, 2009

The engineer’s lot is to sit in the engine room during a confrontation. We have to keep a close eye on the gauges and engines while the rest of the crew are on deck and the bridge watching the action. If there is a collision, we have the added fear of a possible hull breach where icy cold water from the Ross Sea could shower down on us in the engine room.

After our collision with the Yushin Maru 3 on February 6th we did have a hull breach. Our crew scrambled around below decks looking for any water coming in, but luckily it was well above the water line. Our ship suffered a hole in the anchor well that spanned two decks. After the fine work of our best welders, it was fixed in no time.

I know I wasn’t alone in losing sleep over this last week. We started the month with finding the fleet and confronting them over their illegal and immoral whaling. Our crew suffered minor injuries from objects thrown at them, powerful blasts from water cannons and unknown effects from the new weapons in the whaler’s arsenal—the Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) and its unknown effects to our health.

We are in the most remote waters on Earth. We are here to do the job of unwilling governments to stop wilful lawbreakers and it’s not easy. Most of us are not professionals and some are first time sailors. We do our best and none of us regret a minute of our time defending the whales.

I want to make special mention of the five Minke whales that were slaughtered on our watch. Usually the whalers run from us when we show up, but this time they didn’t. We all feel deep sorrow for the loss of these gentle creatures. We tried our best and did everything we could, but we simply weren’t fast enough to stop the cruel harpoon boats before they got to you. This failure will remain in our hearts forever.

Back in the chase

Engine Room Blog
By David Nickarz, Tenth Engineer
Wednesday, February 04, 2009

We are now in our fourth day of chasing the Nisshin Maru—the factory whaling ship that has no business being in the Antarctic Whale Sanctuary. We’re all pretty glad their running from us because that means no whales can be killed. The engineers have some more work to do with the increased speed of the chase, and we have to deal with the increased air pollution as well.

This is all worth the price if fewer whales are killed this season. During my shift in the engine room I make the time to take brief visits to the bridge. Sometimes the Nisshin Maru is a mile away and obscured by fog, and other times it is only tens of meters away with their water cannons on full bore. It kind of looks like they are wetting themselves with fear.

I hope the whalers feel even a small fraction of the fear that the whales have to endure. Hundreds of Minke whales and tens of Fin whales will have exploding harpoons enter their bodies and shards of metal thrust into their internal organs. These whales will never know why they are being slaughtered—for commercial gain, false science and national pride.

We had the privilege of watching Fin and Minke whales swim along side us as we chased their killers from the Ross Sea. It really is the least we can do.

Old Maui - redux a la Sea Shepherd

Old Ross Sea
Sung to the tune of ‘Old Maui’ by Stan Rogers

It’s a damn tough life
Full of toil and strife
We whale saviors undergo

And we won’t give a damn
When the gale is done
How hard the winds did blow

‘Cause we’re southward bound
To the Antarctic grounds
With a good ship taut and free

And we won’t give a damn
When we drink our rum
With the whales of old Ross Sea

Chorus

Rollin’ down to old Ross Sea, me boys
Rollin’ down to old Ross Sea,
We’re southward bound
To the Antarctic grounds
Rollin’ down to old Ross Sea

Once more we sail
With the Southerly gail
Through the ice and wind and rain

Them Fin back whales
Them Minke tails
We soon shall see again

Six hellish weeks
We’ll passed away
On the cold Antarctic Sea

‘Cause we’re southward bound
To the Antarctic ground
Rollin’ down to old Ross Sea

Chorus

How soft the breeze
Through the island trees
Now the sun is far astern

Our rope traps sprung
Those whalers done
No more will they return

May all the whales
Be safe and sound
From the cold harpooner’s steel

So that whales abound
In the Antarctic ground
Rollin’ down to old Ross Sea

Chorus

Book inspired thoughts

Engineer’s Blog
By David Nickarz - Tenth Engineer
January 27, 2009

It’s now 54 days into our mission to stop the pirate whaling of the Japanese government in the Antarctic Whale Sanctuary. We left Hobart about 6 days ago now, after a short break to refuel and re-provision.

We have now returned to the whale sanctuary. This refuge had been established by several nations in the early 1990’s as a place whales could live and feed, unmolested by humanity. Whalers ignored the establishment of this sanctuary and continued their commercial slaughter under the lie of scientific whaling. They resorted to this lie because a moratorium on commercial whaling, established in 1986.

After almost finishing Andrew Darby’s book Harpoon, I’m given a sense of history of the holocaust that humanity has inflicted upon the great whales of the world. Whalers have started with the largest of the whales—the Blue Whale and chased it to the ends of the earth, and to the edge of extinction. The Right Whale was the ‘right’ whale to kill, not because of their size, but because they happen to float when you kill them. There is no great mystery to the names given to the great whales--in fact some of them are down right ignorant.

The Sperm Whale was given it’s name because, as Farley Mowat puts it in his book Sea of Slaughter, “because some idiot thought that the large sack of oil in its head was full of sperm.” (I’m paraphrasing).

The Minke Whale was named after a German named Mincke, who accompanied Svend Foyn, a 19th century sealer, often called the father of industrial whaling. He developed both a ship fast enough to catch the quicker whales and the grenade-tipped harpoon, which is still used today. The other name for a Minke whale is Piked whale—not much better.

I propose we change the name to something vastly more dignified than after a seal clubber or the method of slaughter.

All this history brings me back to my role on this ship. I sit here day after day in this engine room—watching dials, cleaning up and feeding oil into engines. After 53 days and more than 100, four hour shifts, I can say that it’s wearing me down.

I am encouraged to know that I am part of an effort that could see the end to Antarctic whaling—just as the generation before me saw the end of whaling in Australia and the introduction of a ban on commercial whaling world-wide.

As we approach the fleet of whale killers, I have a greater sense of history and my place in it thanks in part to Andrew Darby’s book Harpoon.

Dave's Antarctic musings

Engineer’s Blog
By David Nickarz - Tenth Engineer

We are underway the second time this season to find and stop the criminal whaling fleet from Japan. This is my third Antarctic whaling campaign with the Sea Shepherds and I hope it will be my last. Putting up with the rough seas and time away from my loved ones takes its toll on us volunteers.

We can’t just walk off the ship and go to the nearest pub for a beer, or to the nearest park for a dose of terrestrial wilderness. We are stuck in this noisy metal box for the next several weeks. Of course, it’s nothing compared to what the Minke and Fin whales have to endure.

Our purpose and the vast ocean wilderness keep us going. We’ve seen a number of sea birds including the Albatross which seems to hover without beating its wings. They fly around the ship, perhaps hoping to find discarded food scraps. Maybe the Albatross thinks we are a fishing vessel and is waiting for the discarded portion of the catch. Who knows?

Our engine room watch has been uneventful and routine. I hope it stays that way.

A Ban on Parks Logging in Manitoba

A Ban on Logging in Parks

By David Nickarz

The Province of Manitoba has decided to ban logging from all provincial parks (except Duck Mountain) by April 1 of 2009. This is good news.

It’s about time that our Provincial Parks were saved from logging. People have been working for 18 years to accomplish this goal. It’s a credit to people such as Pat and Russ Popp, Eric Reder and Billy Granger of the Wilderness Committee, Ron Thiessen of CPAWS and numerous park users who spoke out successfully for our Wilderness.

The late Alice Chambers worked for years to preserve our parks before anyone thought of even asking for logging to be removed from parks.

I’ve been working on this issue since about 1990. Tembec (Then Abitibi-Price), the newsprint mill in Pine Falls, Manitoba was renewing their logging licence and had successfully lobbied the provincial government to allow them to log in parks. They raised the spectre of job losses due to the mere 5% of their wood sources that came from parks.

In 1993 the Parks Act was amended to allow logging in parks all over Manitoba. By 1997 parks had been carved up into land use categories, allowing for resource extraction in the oldest stands of trees. The older trees (meaning more volume of wood for the mill) in parks were targeted first—perhaps in an effort to avoid any new conservation measure that would get logging out of the parks.

The once lush forests near Bird Lake, Cat Lake and Long Lake have been permanently degraded for their private profits. Tembec’s legacy is marked by clear cuts, degraded soils and displaced wildlife. If you look at a ‘forest inventory’ (what an awful term for a living ecosystem) map of Nopiming Park, you see that most of the areas off limits for logging are recent burn sites, which have younger trees not suitable for the mill. The other places are too close to cabins and campgrounds.

The province will pay Tembec more than three million dollars to get out of Nopiming Park. This is as a ransom for our public heritage. Tembec has profited off the destruction and degradation of Nopiming ever since it was a park established in the late 1960’s. They’ve roaded it, clear cut it and left it a shell of its former self. Over the years, they have also been charged for violating numerous conservation laws.

They’ve made their clear cuts too big, logged right up to rivers and streams, logged too close to bald eagle’s nests, clear cut in threatened Woodland Caribou habitat and spray toxic pesticides. They spill oil in the forest, leave garbage behind and lie about it all through their front man Vince Keenan.

Tembec should be held accountable for these crimes against nature. They should be paying three million dollars to start reforestation work in the park. Their assets need to be seized and the mill needs to shut down. They pollute the mouth of the Winnipeg River to the tune of thirty million gallons per day. They burn coal to fuel their mill and don’t even use recycled paper anymore.

The mill buildings should be torn down and the land reforested. The name of the town should be changed to Pine Stands, Manitoba.

Does this all sound too unrealistic to you? So did asking for a parks logging ban 18 years ago.