...is actually quite the campaigner for animal rights.  She's actually raised quite alot of money for animal rights and care organizations.

Your scintilating exposure of your heavenly intellect is far more erotic (than Pam has ever been) Sarah.  Love the ocean story search.  Hehey.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

A trivia challenge for all you film majors: see if you remember the what/when/where/by-whom of the faux-film, without googling it.

I have nothing against Pamela Anderson, to catch a glimpse of whom poor hapless Borat crossed the United States, at great risk of his life; nor against Baywatch, whose David Hasselhoff is something of a minor video celebrity; nor against stripteases, and other embarrassing episodes in which the absence of clothing, with strangers looking on, is arguably regrettable.

But, we might point out that Ms. Anderson's statement to the Canadian ambassador might have been more impressive, had she done her homework, and understood that the disgraceful Canadian slaughter of young harp seals does not take place in the Arctic, but in and around the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, a fair distance to the south.

Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.

I am a little divided on the sore subject of seals and sea lions, which are part of the indigenous diet (think Eskimo-like), in some places a horrible pest that eats up all the fish and shellfish, and universally hailed by "greens" as some misguided symbol of fuzzy nature love and cuteness. It's complicated.

Onward through the fog

It should also be pointed out that the harp seal, Phoca groenlandica, enjoys the IUCN status of species of "least concern."

The University of California Press's "Encyclopedia of Animals" says:

<<
Conservation Watch:
Harp seal slaughter: In the late 1980s, a public outcry halted the clubbing of Canada's whitecoats, the very young pups of harp seals.  Older pups have since been hunted throughout the Atlantic Ocean, however, often at levels that could precipitate a serious decline in overall numbers.
>>

So yes, the slaughter continues, only of pups slightly older than the pure white ones.  But I do not believe there is any urgent danger of a decline in population as the effect of the slaughter.

Or so I am led to think.  Last year, however, observers in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence reported that the ice was too thin and fragmentary to support many seals, with the result that many pups drowned.  (They cannot swim when they are very young.)  It remains to be seen if that is part of a global-warming-related pattern.

Meanwhile, the seal slaughter is indeed a serious animal-welfare issue, but not yet a conservation issue.  (Perhaps Blueplanet and Suzannah might comment, if they are reading this.)

That said, even if the seal slaughter is not a conservation issue, it is most certainly an environmental issue, inasmuch as environmentalism is concerned with proper relations between human beings and other living creatures.

It is hard to believe that environmentalists might often justify the use of the term "pest."  Perhaps certain invasive species that are destructive, dangerous and difficult to eradicate can be called "pests," such as lampreys in the Great Lakes, cane toads in Australia and pythons in the Everglades.  But seals and sea lions?!

As for the deplorable old prejudice that predatory animals deserve to be strictly controlled, even eliminated, because they compete with human hunters (including fishers) for certain food animals (cod, in the case of the harp seal), that simply has no place among environmental values.

Chickens are our cousins! So are fish! So are other sentient animals! Let us learn to be kind.

The ice season was bad last year and the ice broke up during a big storm when a small fleet of boats were up on the Harp Seal grounds. The storm piled the ice up in the channels so the fleet was stuck for I think 30 days. It cost millions to get those boats out of there, some by helicopter and some by ice breaker. They did not have a good year on the harvest, and it sounds like the pups had a hard time too.

All I say is the the Law of Unintended Consequences (my invention, darn it!) works in mysterious ways.  Let's take the Atlantic Striper, a sea bass famed for its sporting fight. They came back from seriously depleted stocks then to eating up about everything inshore, including lobsters, flounder, cod, shad, crabs, bait fish, and so forth. Catches of 4-foot long stripers are not uncommon. So while environmentalists hailed the come-back of the striper as a signal that their rules were working great, other stocks were depleted by this "Franken-Fish."

Oops, no offense there Al Franken!
-sammie

Onward through the fog

We don't pay nearly enough attention to our inland water supply. More than 1 billion gallons of contaminated water is trapped in a tunnel in the mountains above historic Leadville in Colorado.

Lake County commissioners have declard a local state of emergency  for fear that this winters above average snow pack will melt and cause a catastrophic tidal wave.

The water is backed up in abandoned mine shafts and is contaminated with heavy metals.

The county officials have been monitoring rising water pressure inside the mine shafts for about two years. In the Eastern Coal fields we call this a mine blow out when the pressure pops the cork.

Most time we don't know which abandoned mine is about to blow until it happens.

At any rate when the ski season is over there may be some good surfing off that mountain.

To be more serious, the damage and risk to health and welfare of the people is no joke. It is not within my area of expertise to even talk about the impact on the water table from all those heavy metals.

The eons of time and nature was good to us down here. It was not until we become civilized that destroying our habitat become fathomable or fashionable.

The silicone in her lips alone will poison the Mediterranean for years...

Keep Pam away from the oceans!

Yes, the Newfoundland and Gulf of St. Lawrence seal hunt issue is complicated, but so far I have yet to see any scientifically sound studies supporting the fur industry's claim that killing harp seals, and to a lesser degree the hooded and grey seals, will bring back cod and other fisheries.  A better solution is to further restrict quotas (the Atlantic Canada fishermen still have a quota for cod, amazingly) and reduce pollution and habitat degredation.  Killing marine mammals is never the solution to boosting fish populations.  The fur industry would like us to feel less guilty about wearing fur so they want us to be telling ourselves that wearing fur helps bring back the cod or some native bird species or any number of other prey species, but these claims are frequently quite dubious.  Good for Pam Anderson and other celebs that are working to expose the fur and sealing industry and the Canadian government.

And Sam, it should be pointed out that according to the Canadian Sealers Association, only about 10% of the seal meat for the Newfoundland hunt was collected in 2005. I haven't seen any more recent figures, but I imagine they're similar.  The commercial sealers are primarily after the pelts, not the meat. While the commercial sealers had a kill quota last year of 270,000 (which, it should be noted, they failed to actually meet as a result of the high pup mortality due to the horrible ice conditions), the Inuit quota was less than 10,000. So clearly the commercial harp seal hunt in Newfoundland and the Gulf of St. Lawrence is not about feeding indigenous people in Nunavut, who most kill ring seals for their diet.

There are just so few economic opportunities in these isolated coastal towns that sealing is an excellent option for staying afloat and staying on their ancestral lands.  

If Ms. Anderson, or Morrisey, or the other superrich anti-seal hunt celebrities would like to donate their millions towards expanding local economic opportunities other than sealing, I'd have much more respect for them.

If the sealing industry in Canada wasn't subsidized by the Canadian government (it spent an estimated $20 million on the seal hunt between 1996 and 2001 according to investigations, and millions more since then), sealing likely wouldn't still be happening, or at least not at the current high kill levels.  The economic data shows that sealers in Newfoundland and Labrador and the Magdalen Islands only make an average of 5% of their annual incomes from the commercial seal hunt, which takes place for just a few weeks in March and April. The rest of the year, most of the sealers go fishing or crabbing.  Also, sealing is an extremely dangerous and degrading way to earn income.  Last year, hundreds of sealers were stranded on their boats miles from land after an ice storm for over a week. The Canadian Coast Guard spent millions of tax payer dollars on their rescue.  Another point is that the sealers aren't going to be able to keep on killing 300,000 seal pups a year if high pup mortality continues to increase with global warming. If the Canadian government really cared about the economic welfare of fishermen in remote Newfoundland communities they would implement a license retirement program that would fairly compensate the sealers and begin to invest in sustainable and safer jobs.