Seal Sitters MMSN Co-Investigator Lynn Shimamoto responds to a dead California sea lion in West Seattle. (Photo Copyright: Robin Lindsey, Seal Sitters MMSN)
SEATTLE — Following another necropsy, a 10th sea lion has been confirmed to be shot and killed in Puget Sound, according to the Seal Sitters Marine Mammal Stranding Network.
The group, which responds to reports of stranded or dead sea lions, noted on their blog Sunday morning that the shot sea lions now totals 10.
Sixteen dead sea lions have been reported throughout King and Kitsap counties, some of whom suffered “acute trauma,” which can be caused by a number of incidents, including human interaction (boating collisions or shooting), or animal attacks (killer whales or sharks). The latest confirmed shooting death was a sea lion found in West Seattle on Friday.
The Seal Sitters Marine Mammal Stranding Network noted in an earlier post that the number of sea lions shot recently is six times higher than the yearly average between September and November, worrying that the “high season” for violence against the animals is still to come.
Killing sea lions remains illegal under the Marine Mammal Act. The punishment for killing one can be up to a year in prison and a $25,000 fine. Laws recommend that a minimum distance of 100 yards is best for keeping sea lions safe.
The Seal Sitters join NOAA and the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society in trying to stop the violence. NOAA is reportedly working on developing guidelines to encourage fisherman to use nonviolent methods to deter sea lions, while also investigating the recent slayings.
“We are concerned about a number of recent reports of marine mammal deaths caused by gunshots in the greater Seattle area,” Greg Busch, assistant director of NOAA Fisheries’ West Coast Office of Law Enforcement, said in a statement last week. “All marine mammals are protected by the Marine Mammal Protection Act and OLE investigates all reported unlawful takes of sea lions.”
Two organizations, Marine Animal Rescue and Sea Shepherd Seattle, offer rewards for any information leading to an arrest in the shootings.
If you have a tip for investigators, NOAA’s hotline is 800-853-1964. If you see a dead marine mammal offshore, or one that’s alive or dead on the shore, report it to Seal Sitters at 206-905-SEAL.
SeattlePI reporter Zosha Millman can be reached at zoshamillman@seattlepi.com. Follow Zosha on Twitter at @zosham. Find more from Zosha here on her author page.
On April 21st, 2006, Captain Paul Watson, founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, commemorated John Muir’s 168th birthday by saluting Muir’s anti-hunting philosophy in an article that accompanied his resignation as Sierra Club National Director, only a few days prior. We have decided to reawaken Paul’s article, as we feel that it is a profound piece, which echoes the feelings of many environmental, conservation and animal rights activists, alike. Thank you for allowing us to post this. Please click on Paul’s photo above to visit the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society’s website. In Unity…
The Sierra Club Chooses Killers over Advocates for Life and Nature By Paul Watson
My resignation from the Sierra Club received more letters of support for condemning hunting than criticisms and this was to be expected considering that more than 80% of Sierra Club members do not hunt.
Of the few who were critical of my anti-hunting position, they reportedly took offense to my remarks as being anti-hunting(of course they were) and they insisted that hunters were a strong conservation lobby and thus essential to protecting wildlife and wildlife habitats.
I probably should have been more definitive of my position. Instead of stating that I was anti-hunting or opposed to hunters, I should have said that I am anti-killing and opposed to killers.
The choice is really between endorsing the infliction of pain, suffering and death or opposing the infliction of pain, suffering and death.
Pro-killers will say that those people like me who are opposed to killing are alienated urbanities, of the privileged class, and insensitive to the traditional rationale that supports hunting.
That argument does not work with me because I was raised as the eldest of seven children by a single mother in a small fishing village in a rural area of Eastern Canada. My father was abusive and he was a hunter.
I have spent a large part of my life in third world nations and on the ocean. I oppose the killing of wildlife not because I am alienated from nature but because I happen to believe that you can’t love or respect nature with a gun.
I walked the trap lines in the Eastern bush as a child. I walked them to free captive animals from leg hold traps and to destroy the traps. I destroyed hundreds of these vicious contraptions between the ages of 11 and 18.
I have seen the suffering. In Kenya I watched a mother elephant literally weep for the loss of her calf. In Michigan I witnessed a Canada goose sit for days without eating beside the body of its mate who had been shot and not recovered. In Alaska I saw a Grizzly cub sitting confused beside the skinned body of its mother who was killed only for her hide. In the Yukon, I followed a trail of blood for over a mile to discover an aerial gut-shot wolf staring at me in fear and bewilderment.
What I have observed in the wild is suffering. It was plainly evident and I felt remorse for the arrogance of our species for justifying the taking of lives for sport, for enjoyment, for fun, and for pleasure.
In Zimbabwe I spent time with big game hunters, some of whom reluctantly led rich trophy hunters into the bush because they had lost their jobs as rangers and President Mugabe had ruled that unless wildlife made money the animals would be eliminated. These hunters described most of their clients as slob hunters, arrogant and ignorant and expressed their shame at being forced to participate in the murder business.
I was amazed to discover that a Texan accountant had won a prize from the Boone and Crocket Club for bagging a trophy whitetail deer and then he was exposed when it was discovered that the rack of an animal stolen from a taxidermist in Alberta had been surgically grafted onto a smaller animal on a game farm in Mexico where they flushed it out from cover into the sights of the great hunter’s rifle.
It was John Muir, the founder of the Sierra Club who first described hunting as the murder business.
In a few places in the world people hunt for survival. In the past, people were forced to hunt for survival. The constituency the Sierra Club is now courting through its killer outreach program are not people who have a need to hunt for survival.
They are people who spend more money on weaponry, travel and related expenses than the value of the meat they obtain. It is not the meat they are after but the thrill of the kill.
Dick Cheney, when not shooting lawyers, describes how he loves to see the ducks tumble from the sky. I’ve heard hunters describe how pulling the trigger gives them an erection.
These are men who slaughter for pleasure. I call them perverse death deviants and I have no apologies for labeling them as such. Killing for pleasure is a sickness, no different than child molestation or rape.
There is no sport in killing an animal from a distance with a sophisticated tool designed to inflict death. The name sportsman implies that there is a fair contest. There is nothing fair about being ripped apart by high powered bullets.
Hunters target the biggest, the strongest and the best of the species they pursue. This is behavior outside the laws of ecology. It is unnatural predation and certainly cannot be condoned by credible conservationists.
Hunters defend their perverse desire to extinguish life by saying it is traditional. Unfortunately many barbaric practices are traditional. However, modern day hunting bears little relation to so called traditional hunting. Hunters today are more akin to those who eradicated the bison and took only the tongues.
Hunters were responsible for the extinction of the Labrador duck, the Passenger Pigeon, the Eastern Bison, the Plains Wolf and the extirpation of the Grizzly from most of the lower 48 states. They were not only killers they were involved in the act of specicide, the complete eradication of entire species. This was not conservation.
Hunters cite Theodore Roosevelt as a big game hunter who was also a conservationist. This is true, he was both. He lived in a time when killing for pleasure was accepted but it was also a time when racism was accepted as normal and it was considered abnormal for women to have any rights, especially the right to vote. Roosevelt did set aside land to conserve much in the same way that the British aristocracy set aside land as exclusive hunting preserves to keep out the lower classes.
The Sierra Club is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to reach out to invite killers to join the Club. The leadership of the Club believes that the over 80% of Club members who don’t take pleasure from killing must be tolerant of the less than 20% who do. They want to bring in more killers into the Club.
There is a big difference between hunting and killing. Photographers and film makers can hunt wildlife. It actually takes more skill to hunt a Mountain sheep with a camera than with a rifle. Any nimrod can pull a trigger and send a high velocity bullet unexpectedly into living tissue to shatter organs and induce shock. The photographer brings back nobility, a creature caught in its natural habitat in harmony with the world around it.
The killer watches his victim tumble from the air or crash to the ground as it chokes and gurgles on its own life blood. The photographer brings back life. The hunter brings back death.
I have been a hunter myself. I’ve never killed anything but I have stalked and hunted human poachers. I have destroyed their ships, their rifles, their nets, their longlines and their harpoons. I have snatched clubs from the bloody hands of sealers and defended myself from their attacks. My form of hunting is much fairer and gutsier than these killers who prey upon their unsuspecting and innocent victims. I target the guilty not the innocent.
Once I trekked with Kenyan rangers across the plains of Tsavo on the track of poachers. We followed their trail of elephant carcasses rotting on the ground with only their tusks removed. We found the criminals. They fired on us and killed one of our rangers. We did not kill them. We wounded two and arrested seven. They were armed with AK-47 rifles and our rangers were armed with British Enfield 303’s. We were up against a superior foe and we beat them. It was not sport. It was not fun. It was dangerous and necessary work and the objective was to save lives, not to extinguish lives.
That is the only kind of hunting that makes sense today in a world with a human population approaching seven billion. If every American exercised their right to kill, the ducks, geese, quail, elk, deer and other creatures would disappear quite quickly. There are simply to many of us and not very many of them.
It can hardly be an egalitarian sport if only a minority of citizens can realistically participate. Instead of encouraging hunting, groups like the Sierra Club should be discouraging the number of hunters. The nation and the world needs fewer killers of wildlife, not more.
In Europe over a hundred million songbirds are gunned down every year. Elephant populations have been reduced by 70% in East Africa since I worked on poaching patrols there in 1978. World fisheries are in a state of collapse. Wildlife is getter scarcer and there is more need now than ever for protection.
Why can’t we protect wetlands simply because wetlands need to be protected? Why is there this demand that killers are needed to help protect wetlands simply because they want to slaughter ducks? Canada geese mate for life. Shouldn’t it bother us that we shatter tens of thousands of these relationships every year? Why should we tolerate the accumulation of lead and steel shot in the marshes and estuaries? Why should we tolerate the legal murder of human beings that we label as hunting accidents, especially when the victim is a non-killer, perhaps a child some nimrod has mistaken for a deer.
The son of Sigmund Freud was walking on his own property in Quebec when a hunter shot and killed him. The killer was found not guilty because the death was ruled an accident.
When a stranger can kill you on your own land and get away with it, it demonstrates that our tolerance for this legal killing has gone over the top of acceptability.
One killer wrote me to say that my radical anti-hunting ideas were unacceptable for a member of the Board of the Sierra Club. When did opposition to killing, to the taking of life, to the extinguishment of a living creature, to the wasting of a sentient being become a radical idea?
Sometimes I think we live in such a bizarre world where advocates for life are considered radical and proponents of death are considered normal, where violence is considered acceptable and non-violence is dismissed as unpatriotic or cowardly.
Few killers question the morality of their actions. Once you have reached a stage where you can inflict cruelty and death, thoughts of morality, empathy and respect have long since vanished.
For if a killer of a deer could feel the pain and anguish of his victim or see the fawn starve because of a mother that did not return they would have little appetite for the meat.
Humans who have crossed the line into dealing death and inflicting misery have become alienated from the wonderment of life and no longer see or appreciate the magic of being alive.
Life is to be cherished, protected, defended and championed, not to be wantonly and cruelly destroyed, and certainly not for so frail an excuse as pleasure or sport.
This essay may be freely distributed and published.
Captain Paul Watson
Founder and President of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (1977-
Co-Founder – The Greenpeace Foundation (1972)
Co-Founder – Greenpeace International (1979)
Director of the Sierra Club USA (2003-2006)
Director – The Farley Mowat Institute
Director – http://www.harpseals.org
Whom when I asked from what place he came,
And how he hight, himselfe he did ycleepe,
The Shepheard of the Ocean by Name,
And said he came far from
the main-sea deepe.
– Edmund Spenser
A.C.E. 1590
Address: P.O. Box 2616
Friday Harbor, Wa 98250 USA
“ECO-PIRATE: THE STORY OF PAUL WATSON” is a feature-length documentary about a man on a mission to save the planet and its oceans. Currently being screened at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival to wide acclaim, this documentary is the first of it’s kind to follow the life of Captain Paul Watson’s tireless battle to save our oceans. Do not miss this film!
For all of the people who hate me, criticize me, loathe me, troll me, threaten me and generally carry on like I really give a damn, all I can say is thanks for taking your time to say so. It is much appreciated.
Sometimes you’re amusing, but most of the time you’re simply boring. But it’s no bother, because I have this simple delete button and a cyber dungeon to conveniently drop your ass into the internet version of the phantom zone, where for all intents and purposes you simply no longer exist on my particular plane of existence.
However I must confess that I do love the fact that so many people get all hot and bothered and spend time talking, complaining, ranting, sharing and even going to the trouble of setting up websites and Facebook pages simply to attack me. How awesome and flattering is that!
People I don’t know and have never met, hate me and I think that’s pretty damn impressive.
I considerate it a disappointing day when I don’t receive at least one hate message. It’s good to know that they know that I’m still here, pissing them off.
A person without enemies is a person who does not do much. Give me a person without enemies and I can guarantee few people really know or care who they are.
All great people have enemies. Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr., Dianne Fossey, John Kennedy, Malala Yousafzai, Russell Means, and so many others including even Jesus Christ. I can only aspire to have the number of enemies they have had. In fact the more enemies one has, the more one achieves. Everyone needs a legion of enemies to inspire them to greater and better deeds and to validate their achievements.
I am not in the business of pleasing everyone. In fact I’m not in the business of pleasing anyone. I’m in the business of defending biodiversity from the irresponsible actions of my own species and that guarantees me volumes of enemies.
I pick up enemies like a dog picks up fleas except that I can shake them off easier than the dog.
If I can please my wife, my daughter, my son, my family, supporters, and my friends, I’m happy. Everyone else is irrelevant.
Even allies become enemies at the slightest disagreement. The infighting within movements is hilarious, like when the People’s Front for the Liberation of Judea attacked the Judaean People’s Liberation Front in Life of Brian.
We really can be a silly assortment species of primates.
I often wonder if a person who sends me a vile or threatening message imagines the said message as being hurtful or damaging to me. Do they really think that I shed a tear with each word? Do they really think I care what they think? I suppose it’s a good thing if they feel a sense of satisfaction with the illusionary belief that they are threatening me. If they deprive some sort of pleasure from it, all I can say, is go for it and enjoy yourself.
Now although I don’t care what people say about me or to me, I am posting this really to help people who are sensitive to attacks from perfect strangers in the internet. It is easy for me to ignore bullying because I simply don’t give a damn but there are people, especially younger people who are indeed hurt by comments from strangers and sometimes such bullying has disturbing and sometimes tragic consequences.
So I would like to advise such people to treat offensive and threatening comments as nothing more than a momentary fart in a windstorm. You may get a whiff but the stench is gone in seconds. People only have power over other people when people allow other people to have power over them.
So my advice to anyone plagued by trolls, haters and critics is simple. Ignore them, block them and delete them. They and their opinions simply do not matter.
Words are not bullets. Words are harmless.
Hell even being called names can be flattering. Years ago I was at the home of a famous Hollywood personality when the phone rang. I picked it up and a familiar voice said “is Maurice there?”
I said no but would you like to leave a message. The voice answered, “yes tell him Orson called.”
“Orson who”” I replied.
“Orson Welles, you idiot.”
Was I offended? Hell no. Orson Welles called me an idiot because I did not recognize his voice. How awesome was that?
The anti-whaling vessel Sea Shepherd will not contest the Southern Ocean against Japanese whalers this season, Captain Paul Watson has announced, accusing “hostile governments” in the US, Australia and New Zealand of acting “in league with Japan” against the protest vessel.
Sea Shepherd has been obstructing Japanese whaling vessels in the Southern Ocean each year since 2005, but Watson said the cost of sending vessels south, Japan’s increased use of military technology to track them, and new anti-terrorism laws passed specifically to thwart Sea Shepherd’s activities made physically tracking the ships impossible.
Australia took Japan to the international court of justice over its Southern Ocean whaling programme in 2014, winning a judgement that condemned Japan’s whaling programmes as being in breach of the International Whaling Commission’s ban on commercial whaling. The court rejected Japan’s argument that its whaling was for “scientific” purposes.
Watson said his volunteer organisation could not compete with Japanese military satellite technology, which tracked Sea Shepherd in the ocean. Japan has also passed anti-terrorism laws that make protest ships’ presence near whalers a terrorist offence.
“We’re just a group of volunteers trying to do the impossible, trying to do the job Australia and New Zealand and the United States and all these others countries should be doing but they’re too busy appeasing Japan.”
In a statement on Monday, Watson said the Japanese whaling companies “not only have all the resources and subsidies their government can provide, they also have the powerful political backing of a major economic superpower. Sea Shepherd however is limited in resources and we have hostile governments against us in Australia, New Zealand and the United States.”
Speaking on radio in Australia, Watson accused the Australian government of acting in league with Japan, indirectly supporting whaling by obstructing Sea Shepherd’s activities.
“Australia is definitely in league with Japan,” he said.
“When our ships come in we’re harassed, we’re investigated, we’re searched, when our crew come in from other countries they have problems getting visas. We’ve been applying for charity status for 10 years – they won’t give it to us. This has been extremely hostile.”
The Sea Shepherd’s pursuit of whaling vessels has also attracted criticism. The Japanese government has described Sea Shepherd as “ecoterrorists” and sought to have Watson placed on an Interpol watchlist.
Join Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and Supporters Worldwide for World Love for Dolphins Day on February 14, 2017
Demonstrations against the global captive dolphin trade responsible for Taiji’s brutal dolphin hunts to take place worldwide.
As another season of dolphin slaughter draws to a close, Sea Shepherd Conservation Society is calling on volunteers, supporters and concerned individuals around the world to join with us and our Sea Shepherd Cove Guardians as we show our love for dolphins and call for an end to the captive dolphin trade that funds the slaughter of cetaceans in Taiji’s infamous cove.
On Tuesday, February 14th, Sea Shepherd will teach the world about the link between captivity and the cove with peaceful World Love for Dolphins Day demonstrations across North America and overseas. Sea Shepherd chapters will host demos at Japanese Consulates and local businesses that profit directly from the dolphin slaughter by trading on their surviving family members and stand in solidarity with Sea Shepherd’s volunteer Cove Guardians currently on the ground in Taiji. On Valentine’s day, animal lovers across the globe will show the world that there is nothing loving about captivity.
Every year, for the past six years, Sea Shepherd’s Cove Guardians have patrolled the Taiji cove, where entire families of cetaceans are driven into the cove and either kidnapped and sold into captivity or ruthlessly killed. The tremendous amount of profit that the Japanese killers are getting for each captured dolphin, is truly the root of the evil that permeates the tiny town of Taiji, Japan. The love and compassion that people around the world have for these amazing creatures is evident in the support for the Sea Shepherd Cove Guardian campaign and their loud voices against captivity.
“Our utmost desire is to see a day when captivity is completely abolished and these beautiful, intelligent beings are allowed to roam free throughout the world’s oceans, instead of being put into tiny tanks and forced to perform tricks, just to get their next meal.” said David Hance, Chief Operating Officer for Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. “Please join Sea Shepherd on February 14th, as we stand up against captivity and against those companies that help perpetuate this horrific industry,” added Hance.
How can you participate in “World Love for Dolphins Day” demonstrations?
1. Demonstrate at a Japanese Consulate or at Local Businesses That Support the Captive Dolphin Trade
Join Sea Shepherd and Sea Shepherd’s Cove Guardians at these locations to educate the public about the connection between the slaughter and the show and encourage the Japanese government, and local businesses to stop supporting the dolphin hunt. Download and print a poster, and join us.
If you are interested in organizing a demonstration at a location near you, please email outreach@seashepherd.org to set up your approved event.
Exposing the Big Game 