Pamela Anderson Speaks Out Against Canadian Seal Hunt

by Annie Hartnett · 2011-04-04 09:07:00 UTC
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Animal lover Pamela Anderson has always been popular in Europe, but lately the blonde bombshell has really earned her title as PETA UK's Person of the Year. The Canadian-born beauty has recently written a letter to her home country in defense of the European Union's 2010 ban on seal products.

Canada's Department of International Trade brought the seal hunt to the World Trade Organization last month, complaining that the EU's ban on the seal trade violated the WTO's rules. Anderson called Canada's challenge of the ban a "huge waste of taxpayer dollars."

Pamela Anderson's letter, written in partnership with PETA, also requested that the hearings on Canada's challenge to the EU's ban on seal products be open to the public. Anderson said that if Canada doesn't have "anything to hide about how seals are bludgeoned and skinned in the commercial slaughter, then there should be no issue with allowing public access to hearings."

The Canadian government certainly does have something to hide: vicious cruelty towards seals. Each year, commercial hunters kill about 325,000 juvenile seals along Canadian coasts. The seals are shot or brutally clubbed to death, and 97 percent of the seals are under three months old.

Pamela Anderson is doing her part to stop the cruelty, but the former Baywatch star can't drown the seal hunt on her own. The most effective way to stop the seal hunt is to help make sealing no longer an economically viable industry, and this doesn't just mean not buying seal products.

Many Canadian seafood suppliers also run seal processors, and many Canadian fishermen hunt seals during their fishing off-season. For this reason, The Humane Society of the United States has called for a boycott of the Canadian seafood industry. The U.S. is responsible for about two-thirds of the profits of the Canadian seafood industry, so a boycott would hit the fishing industry hard. Sign the HSUS's pledge to avoid all Canadian seafood.

Now that you're onboard the boycott on Canadian seafood, make sure to cross one restaurant in particular off your dining-out list: Red Lobster. The restaurant claims to be a "lobster lover's dream," but they're a seal lover's nightmare. The Red Lobster restaurant chain is the world's largest purchaser of Canadian seafood, and one of the Red Lobster seafood suppliers, the Barry Group, also owns Atlantic Marine Products, one of the largest seal processors.

Sign our petition to tell Red Lobster to stop supporting the brutal Canadian seal slaughter.

Photo Credit: Angela N.

Annie Hartnett is a writer and animal advocate who has worked for several wildlife rehabilitation centers and environmental programs.

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