We pulled this great article written in 2007, for The Tyee a Canadian news and culture website, written by Terry Glavin, about the hypocritical anti-Canadian seafood campaigns launched in the UK a few years back.
I saw something the other day that made me sick to my stomach. It was in the February edition of The Grocer, a British retail-food magazine.
There was an article about a campaign that a group called Respect for Animals is waging to convince consumers to boycott Canadian seafood products. The magazine also carried two huge advertisements from the same outfit.
One of the ads consisted of a photograph of a masked man on an ice floe, and a seal lying prone at his feet. The man was brandishing a club with a spike on the end of it. The words You Can Stop This were superimposed upon the picture. The other advertisement proclaimed “Boycott Canadian Seafood & Save the Seals,” with a picture of a can of Canadian salmon.
The Canadian fishing industry exports more than $100 million worth of products into Britain every year. The point of the campaign is to squeeze those sales until the industry begs our government to end the seal hunt.
Read full article here on The Tyee.ca
Terry Glavin’s most recent book is Waiting for the Macaws and Other Stories from the Age of Extinctions (Penguin). His column for The Tyee, Dissent, appears twice monthly.