575 



The lengths to which the Canadian government goes in defending the hunt is 

 exemplified in a brochure which boasts that "hunters often do not kill the seal 

 pups defended by the mothers, probably because it takes them too much time to 

 chase the mother away and to be exposed to the attacks by mother seals while 

 skinning the pups." 



Government literature quotes freely from numerous "expert" witnesses who 

 defend the "human" methods for killing the .«eals. Other eye^itnes.^es disagree, 

 however : Brian Davies has told of hearing a seal scream twice as the skinning 

 knife was plunged into it. and Alice Herrington has described watching baby 

 .'^als being clubbed 14 times while the mothers watched in terror. 



Yet. the Fi.sheries and Forestry Department's news release on the hunt's 

 opening promi.ses that "the same high standard of surveillance of the seal hunt 

 will be maintained this year." But in the final analy.<is. the question of the 

 humaneness of the hunt is not a real one. The hunt, by its very nature, is and 

 must remain brutal. The only way to make it humane is to eliminate it- 

 Will the Canadian-Norwegian .seal hunt continue this way in the years ahead? 

 Apparently so. acc-ording to a Canadian embassy spokesman, since there is prac- 

 tically no domestic opposition to the hunt except for Brian Davies and his group. 

 And when the hunt oflBcially ends on April 24. after some 24O.000 seals have 

 l>een killed, it will he only a matter of weeks before U.S. hunters get their turn, 

 Around July, in Alaska's Pribilofif Island.s. the annual "liarvest" of some 60.000 

 adult Alaskan fur seals will begin, under the supervision of — appropriately 

 enough — the U.S. Commerce Department. 



[From the Washington Post. May 3. 1971] 

 The Manatee Eats Water-Hyacinth. So It Must Be Saved 



(By Claire Sterling) 



Bangkok. — The manatee, a mermaid in the olden days for sailors who must 

 have been far from home for quite a while, is not altogether the ravishing crea- 

 ture of legend. Its heavy body, twelve feet long, is pocked with slime-green 

 algae, its rubbery nose covered with bristles, breasts leathery, front flippers 

 (there are none at the rear* tipped with three coarse nails. It cannot sing, 

 being mute, though it will sigh and groan when hurt. Neither can it smile 

 enticingly, having no front teeth. Yet when that toothless mouth opens with 

 gluttonous pleasure as those clumsy flippers shovel the food in — the upper lip is 

 cleft for speedier intake — the charm of this .singular mammal becomes apparent. 



For the manatee eats water-hyacinth, will eat practically nothing but. and 

 keeps at it all day long. Nobody else is so inordinately fond of this watery vege- 

 table, which few fish will bother to nibble at. the lower biological orders dont 

 care for. and humans find i>eculiarly obnoxious. That is why. after letting 

 manatees very nearly die off without a second thought, we are suddenly giving 

 them our affectionate attention. 



Once the water-hyacinth was simply a pretty flower in Japan. Then it went 

 off with someone or something to South America, after which it soon began to 

 show up in almost any body of water where the climate was genial. Breeding 

 both sexually and vegetatively and growing a mile a minute, it is now choking 

 rivers, lakes^ bayous, canals and even ponds in many of the U.S. Gulf states, 

 most of Central and South America nearly all Africa from the Congo and 

 Rhodesia to Tanzania and Madagascar, and eastward to India. Pakistan. Indo- 

 nesia. Thailand. Vietnam, the Philippines. New Zealand. Australia. The whole 

 Congo River has been threatened by it. Half the White Nile's flow through the 

 vast Sudanese Sudd Swamp is lost because of it. Almost every hydro-electric 

 project built in the tropics since the last World War is menaced by it. And it is 

 already a nightmare for development planners here in the lower Mekong Basin, 

 who have Ivarely gotten around so far to building a handful of the forty-odd 

 dams thev have in mind, and are not sure if they dare go much further. (North- 

 east Thailand, in the basin area, is blanketed with water-hyacinth, which has 

 kept three new reservoirs there from filling, i 



There are lots of other objectionable acquatic weeds: water-lettuce, for in- 

 stance, is an ideal home for malarial mosquitoes on Lake Volta in Ghana, and 

 waterfem almost put the Giant Kariba Dam out of business. But water-hyacinth 

 has it all over them as a nuisance. Its seeds can lie dormant for fifteen years, 



