Bardot condemns Canada seal hunt 'massacre'

Former French film star Brigitte Bardot returned to Canada, joining animal conservationists in the growing protest against the country’s contentious seal hunt.

The annual slaughter is used by isolated Atlantic fishermen to supplement their meagre winter incomes.

Bardot returned to Canada for the first time since the 1970s, when she posed on the ice floes with the doe-eyed pups and sparked the global trend of animal-rights activism.

“It’s incredible to think that such dreadful things are still happening in a country like Canada, in a country that can hardly be considered undeveloped,” Bardot said in Ottawa.

“We’re not living in caves any more.”

Paul McCartney and his wife, Heather Mills McCartney, took to the ice in the Gulf of St Lawrence two weeks ago to frolic with fluffy white new-born seal pups that had yet to be weaned from their mothers.

The pop star called the hunt a “stain on the character of the Canadian people” and urged the government to help the sealers turn to eco-tourism and other means of income.

Even though sealers are not allowed to kill the pups until after they moult and lose their downy fur, a regulation that is tightly regulated and generally followed, the photos of the superstars with the adorable marine mammals have helped to draw global attention to the hunt.

Bardot, 71, was denied meetings with prime minister Stephen Harper and fisheries and oceans minister Loyola Hearn, both of whom said it would only serve to give more publicity to opponents of the hunt, due to begin tomorrow or on Saturday, depending on the ice conditions.

Registered sealers will be allowed to kill up to 325,000 pups, typically between 12 days and three weeks old, this year.

Aboriginal and Inuit hunters began the commercial kill in November in Canada’s frozen Arctic waters. The spring leg will move to an arc about 30 to 40 miles off the coast of Newfoundland in April.

Hearn insists that Canada’s harp seal population is thriving at nearly six million, a threefold increase since the 1980s.

He says federal marine monitors verify that most of the seal pups killed have lost their fluffy white fur, as required by law since 1987, and are quickly jabbed through the brain with picks, or shot with one quick bullet.

About 320,000 seal pups were killed during the hunt last year, bringing in £8.1m (€11.7m) from the pelts and blubber. The livelihoods of the fishing communities of Quebec and Newfoundland have been devastated since Atlantic cod stocks dried up in the mid-1990s.

The majority of the pelts are used in the fashion industry and the biggest buyers are Norway, China and Russia. The US has banned Canadian seal products since 1972 and the European Union banned white baby seal pelts in 1983.

Bardot called for a worldwide boycott of Canadian seafood products and was joined at a news conference by Sea Shepherd Conservation Society founder Paul Watson.

The actress was known as an international sex symbol in the 1950s and 1960s when she starred in such films as And God Created Woman, directed by her then-husband Roger Vadim.

She said she left movies more than 30 years ago to devote her life to the protection of animals and established a foundation to support the cause.

Bardot, dressed in black with her hair swept up into a bouquet of pink flowers, said it was unlikely that she would return to Canada.

“I might not ever come here again, so I ask you with my heart and soul … I want to see this massacre stop,” she said.

“I would like that my life would have served at least for that.”