On the Ice Saving Seals - First Officer Crew Blog Sea Shepherd March 30

[Annces]

by Peter Hammarstedt (1st Officer)
On Board the Sea Shepherd ship Farley Mowat
(printed in full with permission of Sea Shepherd)

It's been three years since I was grabbed by the nape of my neck, kicked behind the knee, and thrown to the ice by a Department of Fisheries and Oceans officer desperate to keep footage of the seal hunt from reaching the mass media. With my face firmly pressed against the cold hard ice, the government thug twisted one arm behind my back, bent my wrist at ninety degrees and thrust his knee into my back. I yelled out in pain. Between bursts of crude French vulgarity, he whispered into my ear, "I hope that this is hurting you enough you bastard" and answered my cries with another twist of my wrist.

Far beyond my line of sight, a crew of six baby killers walked back to their ship accompanied by officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Between bashing in the soft skulls of 3-4 week seal pups, they had assaulted five of our crew, broken the nose of another and deliberately targeted our property and person. They were free to go.

As I tuned out the raging Quebecois sitting on top of me, I tried to make sense of it all. Witnessing a seal being killed - pain compliance holds, fines and jail time. Mercilessly butchering defenseless seals and assaulting members of the international media community - pats on the back and seventy dollars per pelt. Through the corner of my eye, I saw one friend and shipmate hauled away in handcuffs. Just past him, another close friend was dragged by her feet into an awaiting Coast Guard helicopter. With the purest of intentions we had come to the ice floes of Canada to defend life and were being treated as criminals. Two of the most compassionate people that I knew were about to be put behind bars. Overnight, the whole world had gone crazy.

In Eastern Canada, right was wrong and wrong was right.

It was then that I saw her, somewhere between my two arrested friends, a grey and black-spotted seal stared at me with her big black eyes. She was ten meters away and seemingly oblivious to all of the chaos around her. Because of our intervention at least she was safe. At least the sealers were being escorted back to their ship; their day of sealing was prematurely over. Maybe we couldn't save the world, but we could save the whole world for this one animal. And nothing that the government thugs from Ottawa dished out was comparable to what this innocent creature would experience if there were nobody on the ice to protect her. She was my anchor in reality. At least something still made sense. Defending her was right. No fine, jail term or physical violence would convince me otherwise.

That was 2005. I still have nightmares from the seal hunt. I saw a white heaven of ice turned into a blood red sea overnight. But because of that one moment, there is no where else I'd rather be every March than on the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

http://www.seashepherd.org/seals2008/blog.html

[hisownpetard]

1. There's no way to express the admiration and gratitude I feel toward people who put themselves

in danger for the sake of saving these wonderful creatures. From the bottom of my heart,
thank you.

[flvegan]

2. Yet they call Sea Shepherd violent extremists.

Oh, the twisted logic.

[robinlynne]

3. how beautiful. what the hell kind of upside-down society we live in....