Our Compass

I may be seen as beating down on the country which welcomed me with open arms, but this is not true either. My work against the seal massacre was done with love for Canada at heart, even when I asked other countries to boycott her. I love Canada enough to want the best for her, to want her to be the best that she can be, and the best for her and the best that she can be in this regard is for Canadian culture to reject cruelty, and shed the cowardice of grown men clubbing baby seals, and reject the deceit of the simplistic myth “more seals, less cod”, which government officials treat as gospel truth, and government biologists know to be false.



Since about 1996, I’ve been involved in the anti-sealing movement in Canada. No, I’ve never been on the ice, but we west-coast British Columbians, who are more anti-sealing than Ontarioans, and much more anti-sealing than Newfoundlanders, do our part to give Canada some semblance of balance.









Every year on March 15, many cities around the world hold demonstrations against the seal massacre, and Vancouver is always one of them. We hold an annual demonstration at the DFO (Department of Fisheries and Oceans) building on Burrard and Dunsmuir in downtown Vancouver. The activists in Victoria and Nanaimo do their own, and I was often invited to partake and speak, if the schedules don’t clash. These demos were usually well attended, with over 100 people in the Vancouver demos and at least 50 in the Victoria and Nanaimo events, sometimes even with police escort (traffic-wise). Seeing my beloved friends Lori, Judy, Bruce, Neil, Rick, Fireweed, Ericka, Lochlan, Annette… distributed in these cities on an annual basis was heart-warming in the extreme; it felt almost like an annual family event. But something kept nagging me in the back of my mind.











No doubt, these annual demonstrations have their benefits. If innovatively done, they would be covered by newspaper and TV, which raises public awareness. But is it enough? I looked at our annual protests from the sealers’ viewpoint, and began to see these annual protests as flashes in the pan. After each flash, the seal hunt would proceed unscathed. To be brutally honest, were I a sealer, I would not feel much heat. I began to see that anti-sealing action should be kept hot throughout the year. Not just one day a year.







I have also done letter writing. First, to my MP (Member of Parliament), then to the DFO, then to the PM (Prime Minister). One day, I received a letter from the DFO head, which of course said that sealing could not be stopped, but at least it was individually and respectfully worded, so I thought. I showed it to Steve Thompson, a fellow anti-sealing activist. He took a glance at it and, without a word, went into his office. A moment later, he returned with a piece of paper which, upon inspection, contained exactly the same letter, word for word, except for the date, which was 2 years prior, and the signature, which was of the previous DFO head. As of that point, I decided to take the campaign outside of Canada, to apply pressure from beyond. And while I set my sight on the U.S., Vancouver activist Ericka Ceballos, founder of CATCA, set her sight on Europe.





In 2003, I launched my first Compassion for animals Road expedition – CARE-1 – which covered 42 states in 7.5 months (more on the CARE tours in a later Gratitude episode). In 2005, I dedicated CARE-3 to the Harp seals and against the Canadian seal massacre. I had my car painted with a slogan: “I AM CANADIAN. BOYCOTT MY COUNTRY!”, and had it lead “funeral motorcades” wherever I went.



One of the most successful was the Houston-to-Dallas Funeral Motorcade for the Seals. The driving distance was 240 miles or 375 kilometers. This is the ideal distance for a seal motorcade. Canadian sealers annually massacre 375,000 baby Harp seals. Our question is: What do 375,000 dead baby seals look like? Sure, 375,000 is a big number for the largest marine mammal massacre in history, but the number usually gets shelved into the left brain somewhere, without having made an emotional impact. We want the right brain to say “OMG!” And our way does exactly that.



Line up 375,000 dead baby seals in single file along a highway and, at 1 meter (3.3 feet) per seal, they will make a single file of 375 kilometers or 240 miles. You have to drive at 70 mph for 3.5 hours to go from one end of the seal line to the other. If you try to get the full impact of the motorcade and concentrate on the vision of the dead-seal-line along the highway, you may get physically sick within the first half hour. The media said “OMG!” All 4 Houston TV stations showed up, plus newspaper coverage in Dallas. While the day before almost no one in Texas knew about the Canadian seal massacre, hundreds of thousands of Texans got to know about it the day after, and some took action against it.



And Texas was not the only one. We did motorcades from San Diego to Los Angeles, from Milwaukee to Chicago, in Detroit and other cities. In general, the truer to the real distance, the more and better the media coverage. Thus, in 2005, because of the motorcades, millions of Americans previously unaware of the Canadian seal massacre were made aware of it, and many took action to boycott Canada because of it.



While CARE-3 was in progress, there was already a Boycott Canadian Seafood drive in progress in the US. What CARE-3 did was to intensified the boycott, and to broaden it to target all Canadian goods and services, including Canadian oil. Across the Atlantic, Ericka worked with European activists to have the EU countries ban Canadian seal products, which has been American policy for years. This dual approach has caused a loss in Canadian revenue from the US and the EU, and, with the loss of the European market for Canadian seal fur, the price of seal fur itself has plummeted, enough to make sealing unprofitable to many sealers. The remaining markets are in Russia, China and Japan, so, we still have a way to go.

 

On the intellectual front, I wrote a piece titled Scapegoated Seals Save Cod which has been widely circulated and read. And here it is:



Scapegoated Seals Save Cod

2005-02

by Anthony Marr

While driving from Toronto to Ottawa – a four-hour trip at 100 km/h – I picked up a hitch-hiker on the Toronto end, who, much to my regret, happened to be a sealer. For want of a more civil remark, I told him that he should have walked all the way to Ottawa, as an atonement.

“What for?”

“The two cities are 248 miles or 390 km apart. If you line up all the seals you guys kill every year in a single file, the line of some 350,000 seals, at a bit more than one meter per seal, would stretch from the CN Tower in Toronto all the way to the Parliament Building in Ottawa. I think, out of respect for these sentient beings, the least you can do is to walk a Funeral March for the Hunted, from the first one you kill to the last.”

“A funeral march for seals? That’s ludicrous. They don’t even have souls, for Christ’s sake.”

“Speaking of souls, I might suggest that you take the Funeral March as a penance. It would be good for your karma, too. Some cultures would believe that you will reincarnate as a seal next life, one destined to be skinned alive, if you don’t do something about it now.”

“Yeah, right, I’m quaking in my boots already,” he sneered.

“Personally, though I do find reincarnation a fascinating concept, I don’t believe this interpretation of it either. I just can’t look at an innocent baby seal and think that it used to be an evil human baby-seal killer, reborn to be skinned alive by other baby-seal killers, to atone for that ex-baby-seal-killer’s crimes. It would be adding-insult-to-injury of the worst kind. But I do think that walking the 390 km on the Funeral March for the Hunted would be good for your soul, if you have one.”

“Sorry to say this to you, pal, but your 390 km is way off base. Most of the seals we kill are just babies as young as two weeks old. They don’t measure up to a meter in length. Your line of seals would be well short of 390 km; 300 km max. So there.”

“I rest my case,” I said, without bothering to argue that adult harp seals average 1.8 meters long, which would counter-balance the baby seals’ shortfall, or point out that the sealers and even the Canadian Fisheries Minister have been dismissing the word “baby”. Instead, I asked, “How can you justify this kind of carnage? Don’t you have feelings?”

“Sure I have feelings. But it’s no skin off my back.” The sneer broadened into a lopsided grin. No seal could ever produce an evil expression as this, that’s for damn sure.

“Do they have feelings?”

“Who? The seals? Why don’t you ask them?”

“I don’t have to. Their writhing when you skin them alive says they do. But you don’t think that they feel pain?”

“I don’t know. And, frankly, I don’t care.”

“Can’t you feel their pain?”

“Not a bit. I hear them scream. I see them writhe, yeah. But I feel just fine. In fact, the more seals I kill, the better I feel.”

“Don’t you also feel just a bit cowardly to torture and kill a pup whose mother cannot defend, who can’t defend himself, and who cannot fight back?”

“Better a living coward than a dead hero, is what I say.”

“Have you no pride?”

“How much is pride a kilo, eh? How much per kilo do you sell courage for? Come to think of it, pride and courage are very expensive to buy. So, you can keep’m. As for me, I have seal skins, seal oil and seal penises to sell, at a hundred bucks a pop, or should I say, a pup, haha.”

Even-tempered as I think I am, I was beginning to see red. I took a moment to collect myself. “I believe that deep down you do feel some pain, however much you succeed in concealing it from yourself. Really, tell me. Why do you do it? You don’t make all that much of money out of it. You’re primarily a cod fisherman.”

His eyes lit up above the grin. “Aha! I kill seals because they eat fish, cod in particular. The more seals, the fewer cod, the fewer seals, the more cod. Plain and simple. There are some 5 million seals out there. They eat up a hell of a lot of cod. So, I don’t get enough.

“I think you got too much. It is called over fishing. And you’re scapegoating the seals for your own blunder driven by greed,” I could have sounded a little less hostile, but I’m not a seal; I’m human.

“We follow the law. If the law says it is okay, it is okay. The law says it is okay.”

“Only 3% of a seal’s diet comprises cod,” I pointed out.

“3% of the total amount of fish eaten by 5 million seals is still a lot of cod.”

I pressed on, “In other words, 97% of the seal’s diet consists of other fish species that prey on cod. Without the seals controlling the population of the predatory fish species, the amount of cod eaten would be many times greater.”

“I’ve heard that before. It’s just a theory, and a vague one at that. There is no proof.”

“I don’t know about you, but we on the west coast have proof,” I asserted.

“What proof? Your harbour seals there eat salmon. I’m sure the same law of nature applies. More seals, fewer salmon; fewer seals, more salmon.”

“That’s just it. It’s just the opposite. On the west coast, it is more seals, more salmon, fewer seals fewer salmon,” I sought to humbly inform him.

“That’s ridiculous. Where’s your proof?”

“Before I provide the proof, could you tell me what fish species the harbour seal preys on?”

“Salmon, of course, and some others, maybe herring, smelt, hake, mackerel, something like that.”

“There are about 20 major fish species on which the harbour seals feed. In descending order of volume consumed, they are rock fish, Pacific sand lance, Pacific herring, Pacific staghorn sculpin, smelt, Pacific tomcod, lamprey, flounder, shad, flatfish, Pacific hake, Shiner surf perch, gunnel, prickleback, juvenile salmonids, Northern anchovy, adult salmonids, Peamouth chub and Pacific Macheral, as well as cephalopods like squid.”

“So?”

“Where are the salmonids on this list?”

“I thought you were going to give me some kind of proof,” he said evasively, but in doing so, jumped from the pan into the fire.

“Do you know that there used to be a commercial seal hunt on the west coast too, combined with a bounty hunt?” I asked him.

“Can’t say that I do.”

“Well, it happened in the late 30’s through into the 60s. By the late 60s, the seal population had become so decimated that the hunt was banned in 1969. The ban stays in force today. The seal population has recovered.”

“Bad news.”

“Good news. According to your formula of more seals, fewer salmon, fewer seals, more salmon, the salmon population in the 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s should be high and that in the 70s, 80s and 90s should be low. Correct?”

“Damn right.”

“Well, just the opposite is true.”

“More seals, more salmon; fewer seals, fewer salmon?”

“Correct.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“Believe it.”

“What do you have to back this up? ”

“Could you open the Road Atlas to British Columbia?”

He did, reluctantly. “This better be good.”

“Pick a river. Any river.”

“Why?”

“Just do it.”

“Alright. The Kitimat River.”

“Do you know about escapement?”

“Sure. It is the number of adult salmon that make it all the way up to their spawning ground to spawn in a salmon run. What about it?”

“Now, let’s see. For the Kitimat river, the 1950s escapement of Chum salmon averaged 16,700; 70s, 26,400; 90s, no mistake, 129,000. For Chinook salmon, 1950s, 4,100; 80s, 9,900; 90s, 16,700.”

“You’re making things up as you go.”

“No. Just photographic memory. Try another river.”

“I don’t particularly want to play this silly game.”

“It is no game. Why don’t you write down these numbers, and check them in a government library in Ottawa when we get there?”

“A waste of time.”

“So, you are afraid to find out?”

“Not at all, ‘cause I know you must be wrong. So, lie some more. Here. The Babine River. What numbers are you gonna make up?”

“1950s, Babine River escapement of even-year Pink salmon average 11,800; 60s, 41,000; 70s, 106,000; 80s, 202,000; 90s, 214,700.”

“The Kishwan River.”

“1950s, escapement of Chum salmon 4,000; 60s, 1,150; 70s, 7,350; 80s, 13,200; 90s, 21,000.”

“The Pinkut River.”

“Escapement of Sockeye salmon in the 50s, 27,200; the 60s, 40,500; the 70s, 73,900; the 80s, 241,000; and the 90s, 260,900.”

“Enough of this crap! Even if these are true, they are west coast harbour seal and salmon, not the east coast harp seal and cod.”

“And the natural law is different in the west than in the east?”

“If your figures are correct, it damn well is.”

“So, are you going to do a funeral march for the seals you slaughter or not?”

“Why should I? They eat my cod.”

*Note: The above numbers were exacted from BC government and academic documents



Latest is that last winter, the Gulf of St. Lawrence became ice-free for the first time. 70,000 baby seals were drowned at birth, and many more were born on the shore, making them easy prey for polar bears and Arctic foxes. So, you might expect that in the very least the Canadian government would reduce the sealing quota accordingly, but, surprise again, it RAISED the quota by equal measure. Where is the logic of that?



If Canada lacks the dignity to be honest about what its own marine biologists know to be the truth, and to end the seal massacre on its own accord based on responsibility and compassion, it will be forced to end it either by a global boycott, where the greatest loss would be the Canadian reputation, or worse, by global warming, which will melt all the sea ice, wiping out the Harp seal species. A worthy Canadian government will devote its energy to fight global warming, including banning tar sands mining, towards saving the seals and the polar bears for our children, and more importantly, for themselves.

Anthony Marr Invites you to join The Global Anti-Hunting Coalition

2003-summer

aim animal issues | a publication of The Responsible Animal Care Society (TRACS)

Canada plans on further increasing the East Coast Seal Hunt.

Anthony Marr Invites you to join The Global Anti-Hunting Coalition

We’ve all asked at some point, “Wouldn’t it be powerful for many groups of like mind to collectively wage a single coordinated campaign, from coast to coast, against a single adversary?” Thus was born the concept of the Global Anti-Hunting Coalition.

In the seven months between August 29, 2003, and April 2, 2004, wildlife preservationist and anti-hunting campaigner Anthony Marr, with best-selling local vegan author Brenda Davis and her son Cory Davis, will be conducting the Compassion for Animals Road Expedition (CARE) through 40 U.S. states and four Canadian provinces (see www.HOPE-CARE.org for the state-by-state itinerary). One of CARE’s main objectives is to form the American chapter of the Global Anti-Hunting Coalition. Anthony Marr will be holding meetings with the directors and giving presentations to the members of interested animal advocacy groups en route to discuss participation, campaigns, strategy and tactics.

The first campaign of the Global Anti-Hunting Coalition will be to apply external pressure on Canada focusing on its:

1. East Coast Commercial Harp Seal Hunt (current quota . 325,000/year . the largest marine mammal hunt in the world, known as .Canada.s Shame. . the HSUS has already taken boycott action against Canada on this issue, but the more groups, the better).

2. Western Canada Grizzly Bear Trophy Hunt (current quota ~300/year plus poaching deaths of ~300 out of a hotly debated estimated population of 4,000-13,000).

3. West Coast Commercial Harbour Seal Hunt (currently being tabled in parliament), quota: an incredible 50,000/year out of a total estimated population of only 110,000 . this must be nipped in the bud).

4. West Coast Grey Whale Hunt (currently being planned . this must be nipped in the bud).

5. Central Canada Gopher Derby (2002 kill . ~60,000).

6. Eastern Arctic Bowhead Whale Hunt (this species is classified .endangered by CITES).

7. Trophy hunting and fur trapping (a passive-aggressive form of hunting . currently about 1,000,000/year) in general.

Groups need not have anti-hunting mandates in order to join. A vegan group, for example, is presumably intrinsically anti-animal-abuse, and therefore implicitly against hunting and trapping.

To join the Global Anti-Hunting Coalition, or if you have any questions, or if you wish to meet with Anthony Marr or arrange a presentation for him during the CARE tour, please contact him at:

Anthony-Marr@HOPE-CARE.org

Anthony Marr has also authored Omni-Science and the Human Destiny

Visit: www.HOPE-CARE.org



Compassion for Animals Road Expedition with Anthony Marr

2004-01-21

Sunday January 25, 2-4pm Compassion for Animals Road Expedition with Anthony Marr

Marr will discuss his anti-hunting / trapping / factory farming coalition, which he is currently promoting on a tour through 40 states with his 7-month Compassion for Animals Road Expedition. For those who are interested in staying later, he should have time to present his “Tigers Forever” slide show which won him the honor of being called “Champion of the Bengal Tiger” in the TV documentary series Champions of the Wild which aired in 20 countries on Discovery Channel, Animal Planet and Knowledge Network. He will also discuss his new book Omni-Science and the Human Destiny.

Location: The meeting will be held in a small theater at 600 Garson Drive NE in Atlanta, a residential complex. (Note: this location is recorded as 3400 Garson Drive NE on mapquest and yahoomaps.)

For more info contact: Lisa Kramer.

 

Kelowna Rally

2005-03-12

WSPA announces: Kelowna Rally

Time: Saturday, March 12th, 11:00am

Location: Kirschner St., Kelowna, B.C. (office of MP Werner Schmidt)

Sponsored by: YAAA (Youth Against Animal Abuse) and TRACS (The Responsible Animal Care Society)

Contact: Carmen or Sinikka Crosland, 250-768-4803  or email tracs@shaw.ca

What’s planned? Led by YAAA (Youth Against Animal Abuse) and wildlife campaigner Anthony Marr, marchers for the seals will meet at the office of MP Werner Schmidt and proceed to walk to downtown Kelowna and back again, for a total of 7 km. YAAA members will be collecting signatures on anti-seal hunt postcards, which they will present to the federal government. They have requested a meeting with MP Werner Schmidt and MP Stockwell Day. A motorcade is also planned from Kelowna to Penticton, following the march.



Funeral March for the Hunted | Committee to Abolish Sport Hunting

Funeral March for the Hunted

Washington DC to New York City 375 km / 235 mi

Start date: March 15, 2005

Experience tells Canadian wildlife preservationist and anti-hunting activist Anthony Marr ( http://www.hope-care.org/ ) that when he informs people that the annual quota of the Canadian Commercial Seal Hunt is 375,000 out of a total population of 5 million, they react lukewarmly, some mumbling something about 7 percent, but when he shows them what 375,000 seals look like, they react volcanically, some exclaiming “Oh my God!”, others “Bastards!” or worse, depending on their religious orientation.

So, what do 375,000 dead seals really look like? If lined up nose to tail, at one meter per seal, 375,000 seals would form a single file stretching 375 kilometers or 235 miles – the exact distance between Washington DC and New York City.

In the Animal Rights 2004 conference, Anthony Marr spoke on Engage Media. “It is well-known that in real estate, the three key words for success are ‘location, location, location’. In activism, the three key words are ‘media, media, media’. Basically, what the public did not see on TV did not happen,” he said. “So, to engage media. What you need are seven essential ingredients, the more used per event, the better, all if possible:

1. The event must be original (not copycat);

2. it must be creative (as outlandish as possible as long as it works – without damaging the movement as a whole);

3. it must be new to media (bearing in mind that something new is new only once at one place);

4. it must be photogenic (TV-friendly; a newspaper article without a photo is weak);

5. it must be difficult and/or dangerous to execute (what few would dare to attempt);

6. it must offer a new viewpoint on an old and hackneyed issue (rejuvenated perception); and

7. it must be transformative (from dry statistics to heart-rending visions).

Abiding by his own advice, Marr executed an event in March 2001, called the Funeral March for the Hunted, where he walked 100 km (about 60 mi) along Hwy 7 from Mission City to Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, carrying a Canadian flag with the maple leaf colored black, and a sign saying “Civilize Canada” on one side and “End the barbaric Seal Hunt” on the other. When asked by media for a sound bite, he said, “100 km is the length of a single file of 100,000 dead seals at one meter per seal; you would have to drive a full hour at highway speed to go from one end to the other.

If you think this is outrageous, consider further that 100,000 is less than one-third of the total number. Canada kills 350,000 seals per year. The line would stretch 350 km, all the way from Vancouver to Kamloops. You would have to drive 4 hours at highway speeds to go from one end of the line to the other. Frankly, I don’t have time to walk that far, but you get the picture.” And the people in British Columbia too got the picture, loud and clear, since all major BC media, and many minor media along the march route, covered the event, some more than once. Upon further questioning, Marr talked about the cruelty inherent in the industry and the scapegoating of seals for the declined of the North Atlantic Cod precipitated in fact by overfishing – a human travesty.

Now, in 2005, in view of the U.S. Senate urging Canada to stop the hunt, and the HSUS unleashing its Boycott Canada campaign, Marr feels that a large-scale Funeral March for the Hunted could just be the final push needed to send the seal hunt to the abyss.

According to the above, Marr has determined to execute Funeral March for the Hunted 2005 from the Capitol building in Washington DC to the United Nations Headquarters in New York City, via Baltimore, Wilmington, Philadelphia, Trenton, Princeton, and Newark, to generate maximum national and international coverage of the issue. The departure date has been set for March 15, to coincide with the HSUS’s continental day of protest. The duration depends on the amount of speaking engagements enroute. He will be carrying a Canadian flag with a ban-sign superimposed on the maple leaf.

Anthony Marr will be inviting activists to join him on the March, in whole or part, each carrying a sign or banner of his/her own making.

He will also explore the possibility of organizing many simultaneous marches across the land. This organizing effort would not be too difficult, given the existence of the Global Anti-Hunting Coalition which Marr formed on his 38-states-in-7.5-months Compassion for Animals Road Expedition CARE tour – see http://www.hope-care.org/ .

More than awareness-raising and action-generating (e.g. boycotting Canadian fisheries products and tourism), this is also a fund-raising event, to further advance Anthony Marr’s effort to protect the seals in particular and wildlife in general (e.g. seals, Bengal tigers, grizzly bears, whales, dolphins, etc. – see http://www.hope-care.org/ ). We ask that you make a generous pledge or donation for this march.

Further, please forward this email in its entirety to your friends and email-list contacts.

“I’ll be 61 when the March starts. I want to put my legs to some positive use while they still work,” said Anthony Marr.



2005-05

TERMINATE-THE-SEAL-HUNT CAMPAIGN TOUR WEST

Here at Healing Earth Sat. May 28th!

End the Canadian Seal Hunt Presentation with author Anthony Marr, Heal Our Planet Earth (HOPE)

Compassion for Animals Road Expeditions (CARE)

Saturday, May 28, 5:00 – 7:00, Free Event at Healing Earth

Terminate-the-Seal-Hunt Campaign Tour West

Strategy and Tactics

Anthony Marr’s 90-day Terminate-the-Seal-Hunt Campaign Tour West will be launched on May 13, 2005, Friday. (He is anti-superstition and a champion of the underdog, including the number 13.) His state-by-state itinerary is as follows: AB, SK, MB, MN, WI, IL, MO, AR, LA, TX, OK, NM, CO, UT, AZ, NV, CA, OR and WA.

He has almost single-handedly and without financial aid organized the tour up to this point, and has been successful in booking over 30 events for the first half of his 90-day itinerary from May 15 to August 15. But once on the road, he will need an anchor-person or two to continue developing the latter half of the tour to bring out its full potential, and some financial infusion to fill his gas tank

The major cities with events firmly set so far include Edmonton, Minneapolis, Madison, Milwaukee, Chicago, Houston, Dallas/Fort Worth, Denver, Salt Lake City, Phoenix, San Diego, Los Angeles and San Francisco, some with more than one event – 35 events in all to date. There are about 20 events still in the works, and Anthony would like to see a total of at least 60 events for the entire tour, in addition to the AR2005 National Conference in Los Angeles, July 7-11, in which. he will be a major speaker. California, especially, is a state with huge potential, that has yet to be even a quarter realized.

His strategy differs markedly from those currently being employed. He believes that just as the Canadian government needs more than demonstrations and letter-writing, but an overwhelming economic boycott, to be brought to its knees, so do the seafood merchants need more than talks of cruelty and compassion to be brought onboard the boycott. He believes that the seafood merchants too, being by and large profit-motivated, would respond most readily to economic impetus as well, both positive and negative. In other words, consumer favoritism for those merchants that join the boycott against Canadian seafood, and a consumer boycott against those merchants who do not. The carrot-and-stick approach, as it were.

Anthony’s tactics are as follows:

1. He will work with the AR groups of at least ten major cities to vigorously petition seafood consumers to boycott Canadian seafood. The target is 5% of the population within 6 months. For a city of 1 million population, we will aim for 50,000 signatures. The petition period will span July 1 through December 31, 2005. This is about the same as petitioning to kick-start a referendum initiative. With due diligence, it is achievable.

2. The signers will be urged to patronize only those seafood outlets that have joined the Canadian seafood boycott, and to shun those that have not.

3. While on tour, Anthony will hold meetings with the leading seafood outlets and restaurants of these cities to inform them of this fact, and
to have them each sign a declaration pledging to not stock, sell or serve Canadian seafood. After his departure, the hosting AR group(s) will
continue with this effort, untill all the significant seafood outlets have been contacted. It will be impressed upon these merchants that 50,000
potential customers (for a city of 1 million) will patronize them if they sign the declaration, or shun them if they don not. Anthony believes that
this is the most powerful motivation for them to join the boycott against Canada.

4. Carmen Crosland (age 14), President of Youth Against Animal Abuse (YAAA), will establish and display a webpage on her website
http://www.YAAAonline.org (pending) of all the seafood merchants that have signed the declaration. This database will likewise appear on Anthony’s website http://www.HOPE-CARE.org.

5. Both http://www.HOPE-CARE.org and http://www.YAAAonline.org will provide E-petitions to aid this drive. Anthony will also help other groups to establish an E-petition page on their own websites.

6. Come the new year, Anthony and Carmen, together with all the AR groups participating in this project, will jointly present the consumer petitions and merchant declarations to the Canadian government, as well as to Canadian, American and world media.

7. Come the new year, Anthony will launch his Terminate-the-Seal-Hunt Campaign Tour East, with the same aim. If the petition targets are met, the ten cities (or more), each averaging, say, 1 million population, will have accumulated 500,000 signatures in total, and dozens of mechant declarations, each worth thousands of consumer signatures. If each consumer forgoes $50 of Canadian seafood a year, the economic loss to the Canadian seafood industry would be $25 million, exceeding the $15 million revenue from the seal hunt industry by $10 million.

The ten cities will serve only as a demonstration of the power of the boycott. If the Canadian government still does not succumb, we will proceed with more cities. In a full-scale assault involving, say, 100 cities of 1 million population each, there will be 5 million consumers pledging to not purchase or consume Canadian seafood, causing an economic loss of $250 million to the Canadian economy. This will make the word “overwhelming” seem like the understatement of the century.

Anthony has tried hard with major anti-sealing groups for some financial assistance for this project. Many have shown interest, but none have been forth-coming with the first campaign dollar, so now he is appealing to grassroots support, in both volunteer and financial terms. Please contact him at Anthony-Marr@HOPE-CARE.org and/or phone 604-222-1169 or toll-free 1-866-822-1169. He is driving out on a near-empty gas tank, but he is committed to the project, and will start driving as of May 13, Friday.

The Chinese have a saying. “Let those with the effort come up with the effort, and those with the funds come out with the funds, and the project shall be successful.”

So let’s get together and get it done!

Contact: Anthony Marr
Heal Our Planet Earth (HOPE)
Compassion for Animals Road Expeditions (CARE)

 

Fish boycott to save seals

2005-05

NEW YORK CITY––Legal Seafoods, a 31-restaurant chain with anchor franchises in New York City and Boston, on May 9 joined Tavern-on-the-Green in Central Park and the 168-store Whole Foods Market chain in endorsing a boycott of Atlantic Canada seafood called by the Humane Society of the U.S. in protest against the Atlantic Canadian seal hunt.

The boycott targets snow crabs, lobsters. shrimp, mussels, and ground fish.

The Legal Seafoods announcement coincided with the arrival in New York City of Canadian ambassador Frank McKenna, who was to make several prominent appearances.

While HSUS is promoting the boycott through a media strategy, Anthony Marr of Vancouver, British Columbia, on May 13 set out on a 90-day “Terminate the Seal Hunt Campaign Tour” of the western U.S. and Canada. Pushing the boycott through personal persuasion and petitioning, Marr said he had 35 speaking engagements already booked, with about 20 more still being finalized.

“Carmen Crosland, age 14, president of Youth Against Animal Abuse, will display a web page at of all the seafood merchants,” who join the boycott, Marr said. Marr will also post the list at his own campaign website, , and welcomes pledges and inquiries about his itinerary at either.