Putin does a good move
on hunting “whitecoat” harp seal pups — the first step in an agreement to end the killing of all baby seals in Russia after Prime Minister Vladimir Putin condemned the practice as a “bloody business.”
Rules allowing a six-week window for hunters to target pups after their coats start turning from snow white to gray will be amended to protect all harp seals less than a year old, according Natural Resources Minister Yuri Trutnev, adding that Russia’s harp seal population has dropped by a third in the past decade as thawing Arctic ice shrinks their breeding grounds and hunting takes its toll.
Said Professor Aleksey Yablokov of Russian Academy of Science: “This is a real biological catastrophe. At the current rate, in a few years the seal could become a rarity in the White Sea.”
“This is a bloody business that should have been banned long ago,” Putin told ministers at a meeting last month, the state-run paper Rossiiskaya Gazeta reported.
In the White Sea breeding grounds, pups are born at the end of February and beginning of March and spend about three weeks on the ice before they take to the water. Hunters traditionally club the pups to death before they’re two weeks old to avoid damaging their snow-white coats, which are used in the fur industry. The skinned remains of the pup corpses are usually dumped into the sea or simply left to rot on the ice.
Putin acknowledged the importance of the hunting industry in the region and said that he would require the government to compensate incomes of the White Sea people in connection with the ban on hunting.
“This is one of their means of existence. Therefore, simply banning is inadequate. A system of support measures must be worked out to secure employment and income of those who live and work there,” said Putin.
News of the agreement is sure to infuriate Norwegian sealing interests (the same bastards that burn unsold seal pelts to keep market prices in check) who were prepared to subsidize 80% of the Russian hunt in the hope of propping up the industry which is in a worldwide free fall. European opposition to commercial sealing has already resulted in national bans on all seal products in Belgium, Slovenia and The Netherlands, and the European Commission has adopted a proposal to ban the trade in seal products altogether.
Note to Canada & Norway: Tick-tock, motherfuckers
