Setting the Inuit record straight on cultural prejudice and the seal hunt

Alethea and I talk about her new film Angry Inuk, the "People of the Seal," cultural prejudice, setting the Inuit record straight, song battles and a new model for animal activism.

Watch the trailer here.

Synopsis

Anti-seal hunting campaigns have attracted high profile supporters, and with them, hefty financial contributions. From Pamela Anderson to Paul McCartney, celebrities have voiced their outrage about an issue they seem keenly unqualified to discuss. Meanwhile, seal hunters are unjustly targeted for traditional practices that have supported them for centuries.

With a way of life on the cusp of extinction, who's really at fault? How does a culture that exercises understated anger and finds peaceful ways to resolve conflict compete with animal activist groups that rely on anti-sealing sentiment they aggressively cultivate to underwrite their other causes?

Harper to promote seal products on China trip

In a bid to resurrect Canada’s flailing sealing industry, Prime Minister Stephen Harper will make seal product exports a priority on his trip to China next week.

The Conservatives have been pushing to open the Chinese market for more than two years, but little materialized from a tentative deal that the Department of Fisheries and Oceans announced in early 2011.

“Our government will continue to vigorously defend this humane and highly regulated industry and to seek new international markets for Canadian seal products, including China,” Mr. Harper said in a statement released on Thursday.

Although the sealing industry is a small fraction of Canada’s fishing industry on the Atlantic coast, the annual hunt is a hot political topic in Newfoundland and Labrador, where the Conservatives hold many seats and most of the country’s 11,000 registered seal hunters live.

Russia used to be Canada’s largest buyer of seal items, but banned the import of harp seal pelts two months ago, and the European Union has had a ban in effect since 2010. Animal activists say these two bans ring the death knell of the East Coast’s commercial seal hunt.

Proposed Seal Cull In St. Lawrence Gulf Draws Fire From Top Scientists And Conservation Group

HALIFAX - Two of Canada's leading marine biologists and a conservation group say a five-year proposal to slaughter 140,000 grey seals in the southern Gulf of St. Lawrence is being driven by politics, not science.

"I don't support it," said Hal Whitehead, a professor at Dalhousie University in Halifax who specializes in the study of whales. "From what I've seen of the rationale, it doesn't make much sense to me."

Earlier this month, a federal advisory panel urged Fisheries Minister Keith Ashfield to approve the cull, which would result in the killing of 70 per cent of the grey seals that feed in an area that stretches from Quebec's Gaspe Peninsula to the east side of Cape Breton.

The Fisheries Resource Conservation Council, made up of scientists and fishing industry representatives appointed by the minister, said the proposed cull is an experiment that will test indirect scientific evidence suggesting grey seals are impeding the recovery of cod stocks.

Whitehead said the council's description of the project as an experiment is laughable.