Commentary by Sea Shepherd’s Captain Paul Watson,

Forty years ago on March 15th, 1977, French film star Brigitte Bardot traveled to the ice floes off the Eastern Coast of Canada to focus attention on the slaughter of baby whitecoat seals.

Her arrival was met with hostility by Newfoundland sealers and by the Canadian government, yet despite harassment and ugly threats she rode in my helicopter far offshore to meet the seals.

She was fearless. We flew through blizzard conditions with very poor visibility to over a hundred miles off the coast.

Upon arrival in the midst of thousands of seals, she posed cheek to cheek with a baby seal for photos that circulated around the globe and brought the issue of the slaughter of the seal pups to a global audience.

For the two previous years, we had worked to get media attention to this atrocity on the Eastern Canadian icefloes…