Seal hunt activist: Group run off road

Animal-rights activists said their vehicle carrying foreign journalists was run off the road today as they were making their way to their helicopter to document the country’s contentious seal hunt.

They were then trapped as an angry mob surrounded their hotel.

Members of the Humane Society of the United States said about 60 supporters of the seal hunt, which has moved to the ice floes off the north-eastern coast of Newfoundland and Labrador, surrounded their hotel in Blanc-Sablon, Quebec, a small town near the Labrador border.

Rebecca Aldworth, a spokeswoman for the Humane Society of the United States, was reached inside the motel and said the situation was tense around noon.

“There’s only two police officers out there,” she said.

“They could get us out of here if they wanted to, but they’re refusing to take us in their police vans.”

Aldworth said the police were serving as mediators between the angry fishermen - whose livelihoods are supplemented by sales of the pelts and blubber – and the Humane Society, which calls the hunt barbaric and wants it halted.