Really? Humankind!

"There's an assumption that lion has replaced tiger in the market, and therefore there's a decline of pressure on tigers, but that's not the case."
"The demand for tiger and other big cats marketed as tiger is so huge that not only is it consuming farmed tigers, but wild tigers are also still being poached."
"[The legal trade in lion parts] stimulates demand and perpetuates the desirability of these products."
"So long as there is a demand, there is going to be pressure on the world's remaining tigers."
Debbie Banks, Environmental Investigation Agency, London

South Africa claims that a stockpile of bones has been created by restrictions on international game hunters taking home their “trophies”      STEPHANE DE SAKUTIN/AFP/GETTYIMAGES

"We also believe that around 90 per cent of the lion skeletons that went to Asia still had their skulls, which means they were not hunted or the skulls would have been kept as trophies."
"Growing an industry which slaughters lions in abattoirs specifically for their bones is indefensible and cannot be justified."
Michele Pickover, director, conservation charity, EMS Foundation

"Today’s landmark decision was reached in the High Court in the matter NSPCA vs Department of Environmental Affairs. The decision is with regard to the South Africa’s controversial lion bone trade. The trade of lion bone in 2017 and 2018 was ruled unlawful and unconstitutional . This judgement reiterates the 2016 Constitutional Court judgement. We celebrate the ruling and we must now work towards shutting down this industry which harbours approximately 14,000 lions in captivity."
Conservation Action Trust, 6 August 2019 

By N KOLLAPEN JUDGE OF THE HIGH COURT, GAUTENG DIVISION, PRETORIA  - 6TH AUGUST 2019

In December 2015, lions were added to the Endangered Species List by the United States. Leaving Americans free to continue shooting lions in legal hunts throughout Africa, they had to prove the hunt had benefited lion conservation if they wanted to carry home the trophy. South Africa operates a program they call "put and take" hunts. And most certainly those who take advantage of the brave opportunity to kill a lion that is bred with hunting facilities for these "put and take" hunts do not qualify.

Lion breeders in South Africa breed lions specifically for the purpose of exporting their skeletons. The market for lion parts in Asia is booming. And there they are identified as tiger parts. It is a vastly lucrative business and it is rising in popularity. Speculation has it that a ban by the United States instituted in 2015 when imports of captive-bred lion trophies were outlawed may have spurred this trade in lion parts.

This is all linked to a rather serious oversight in an international treaty that prohibits buying and selling products made from any big cat species. The sole exception is the African lion. Their skeletons, including claws and teeth, may be traded, as long as the animals have been bred in South Africa in captivity. The majestic king of beasts bred in captivity so it can be eviscerated, the body parts and bones sent to Asia for 'cultural' purposes.

Prior to the ban, over 8,400 captive-bred lions were housed in South Africa's breeding and hunting facilities, many destined for these "put and take" hunts, where tame animals are released within a fenced-in hunting camp to give a  hunter the thrill of stalking and shooting the animal. Researchers surveyed 117 facilities in South Africa's breeding program, keeping or arranging hunts of captive lions, to determine just how the ban had affected the lion breeding industry. Should quotas constrain their business, half of the respondents in the survey planned to turn to illegal trade.

Prices for live lions were tracked by the researchers, seen to drop up to 50 percent -- with over 80 percent of respondents claiming that the ban had affected their business, others reporting staff lay-offs and being forced by circumstances to euthanize lions. The international bone trade attracted about 30 percent of the respondents where prices for skeletons rose over 20 percent since 2012.

Skeleton exports increased in the year following the ban, from 800 to 1,800 lions, with female skeletons selling for $3,100 on average and male skeletons priced at $3,700. An annual export quota for captive-bred lion parts was mandated for South Africa in 2015 by the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species. South African authorities then set a quota in 2017 of 800 skeletons.

While tiger products are wildly popular in Asia, lion bones are meant for use in producing tiger bone wine. Claws and teeth are transformed to jewellery. Additionally over a five-year span, Panthera, a conservation organization, documented a 68 percent decline in Limpopo National Park, Mozambique of their lion population, where in 2017, 21 lions remained. In Namibia and Mozambique, researchers reported finding lions with faces, paws or toes removed.

Researchers are examining whether and how demand for legal big cat products affects poaching, according to Michael 't Sas-Rolfes of University of Oxford in Britain, one of the survey researchers of South Africa's lion industry. The new ban, he warns -- on lion bone exports -- may exacerbate poaching, not merely fail to curb it.

Roaring trade in lion bones fills gap in the market for tiger parts, Conservation Action Trust

Nature's Gift and Curse of Tusks to Elephants

"Tooth development has been very conserved during evolution."
"Elephants are no more different from humans than mice are, so it's quite possible that the same gene or genes are involved [in tusklessness in elephants and human toothlessness]."
Irma Thesleff, developmental biologist, University of Helsinki, Finland

"We know tusks play an important role in obtaining food, so if individuals don't have that tool, are they using the environment differently, and could those changes have consequences for other animals dependent on elephants as ecosystem engineers?"
Shane Campbell-Staton, assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, University of California, Los Angeles

"They're [the tuskless elephants of Gorongosa, Mozambique] in fantastic condition, this is a very good habitat [Gorongosa national park] for them, and there's no indication they're suffering nutritionally."
Joyce Poole, scientific director, Elephant Voices research and advocacy group, Gorongosa 

Gorongosa Blog

Science has not yet unravelled the mystery of what causes tusklessness in elephants, but through slow and steady research some progress has been made deciphering the genetic program of mammalian tooth development in general, where scientists have discovered an ancient, widely-shared genetic code. Mutations linked with tooth abnormalities in mice show up as well through genetic studies of humans who have missing or malformed teeth.

Elephant tusks are overgrown upper lateral incisors -- those teeth located right beside the front teeth, before the canines. Tuskless elephants, therefore, don't have lateral incisors. Throughout Africa tuskless elephants are anomalous, found in discrete numbers. Gorongosa is an exception; there a sizeable population of tuskless elephants occur. The tusked elephants were victims of a remorseless civil war which incidentally saw elephants slaughtered for ivory. The tusklessness of those surviving elephants without ivory represented their Darwinian advantage.

The result of that ravaging of the park's tusked elephants is that roughly a quarter of the 700 elephants living in the park are tuskless females. Among humans, missing lateral incisors represent the second most common form of tooth agenesis of which the normal rate of the condition lies between two to four percent, roughly analogous to the rate of tusklessness among African elephants.

Generally speaking, tusks are canines curving to the side and upward in wild boars and warthogs, or they droop downward in walruses, while in narwhals of the Arctic the tusk is a single overgrown canine penetrating through the left upper lip of the animal giving them their iconic 'unicorn' appearance. As multipurpose aids tusks are useful implements. Those incisors are used by elephants to dig for salts and minerals; break off branches to reach foliage; they're used to pry and peel off tree bark; to scoop a calf from a mudhole or lift a resting one to its feet.

Bull elephants contest one another by locking their tusks in combat. Those tusks can each weigh up to and over 45 kilograms, seven times the weight of an average female tusk. Those naturally-endowed implements so useful to the elephants have led to their deaths in enormous numbers by poachers setting out to harvest valuable ivory which has always been in high demand as a beautiful material used to carve detailed pieces of artful objects.

International efforts to have the trade banned have had only partial success, with the ivory so valuable that no amount of protection suffices entirely to acutely limit a billion-dollar illicit and inhumane trade. A situation that has led researchers to consider whether elephants would be better off without those mighty tusks, imagining the loss to the trade should the tuskless trait spread throughout the African population with a little bit of help from scientific human intervention.

This intriguing conundrum has the attention of Dr. Campbell-Staton and his colleagues at University of California who have been comparing tusked and tuskless elephants in Gorongosa, hoping to identify and isolate the genes involved in tusklessness, and to solve the patterns of inheritance. As for example, why it is that almost all the tuskless elephants of Africa are female.

Gorongosa Blog

Wild-Caught or Captive-Bred Reptile Trade

"The scale is huge, much bigger than people realize"
"This trade is likely having a massive impact on ecosystems and populations of lesser-known animals."
Vincent Nijman, anthropologist, Oxford Brookes University, Britain

"These are the most blatantly questionable cases where we think something must urgently be done."
Mathias Loertscher, Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites)

"At most of these facilities, there was just no evidence of captive breeding actually happening. And at the one where breeding efforts did take place, that only applied to one to three species kept at their facility."
"If you have international demand for a species that only has a very small distribution, you have a big problem."
Mark Auliya, conservation biologist, Zoological Research Museum Alexander Koenig, Bonn, Germany

"In the Indonesian context, there's a hell of a lot of snakes and reptiles out there, and for most species the issue of laundering through breeding farms is not resulting in negative impacts on populations."
Daniel Natusch, herpetologist, University of Sydney, Australia

Illegally traded green pythons (Morelia viridis) in the black market pet trade. Photo courtesy of Jessica Lyons.

In 2016, Indonesian officials awarded a permit to PT Alam Nusantara based in Jakarta to export 45 "captive bred" echidnas. Echidnas, egg-laying mammals resembling hedgehogs, have produced a dilemma for zoos around the world attempting to breed the little creatures. They are not given to reproducing naturally in environments not their own. Over decades zoos around the world have been able to breed fewer than 50 echidnas. Something doesn't compute there.

Indonesian authorities authorized export of over four million captive-bred animals in 2016 alone. Experts know very well that it would be impossible to secure that number of animals that have been bred in captivity, not trapped in the wild, but taking animals out of their natural habitat is cheaper and far easier than committing to set up breeding operations. Tokay geckos are low-profit animals traded at high volume and as such not good candidates for breeding operations.

Caught in the wild geckos are sold for very low prices. Breeding of one million geckos, a trader would require breeding stock comprised of 140,000 females, 14,000 males along with 30,000 incubation boxes, 12,000 rearing cages and the work of hundreds of employees. Imagining a single facility geared to this kind of production, according to Dr. Nijman, would require an installation "the size of an aircraft hangar", to produce animals that sell for a few cents apiece.

It is not only Indonesia where questionable practices in the trade of animal species sold all over the world as pets occurs, but Indonesia certainly stands out as one of the major offenders in illicit trade. Indian star tortoises from Jordan, red-eyed tree frogs from Nicaragua, and savanna monitors from Ghana and Togo are also exported abroad purporting to be captive-bred, when in all likelihood, according to experts in the field, they are nothing of the sort.

Some 80 percent of 5,000 green pythons exported annually as captive-bred in Indonesia were illegally gathered in the wild, serving to deplete some island populations, cited a study published in the journal Biological Conservation. Dr. Auliya surveyed eleven registered reptile breeding facilities located in Indonesia, only to discover that merely one of them had the potential of being used for anything other than "laundering" wild animals.

Cites' investigations list five cases from Indonesia that have been examined -- the most of any country -- the result being that officials now are required to give proof that animals to be sold abroad such as Oriental rat snakes and Timor monitors have genuinely been captive-bred. Cites has the authority to bar international trade in those species.

Traders are  reliant on Indonesia's Cites authorities for responsible quotas reflecting sustainability to be set, according to Adri Tasma, owner of a reptile farm located close to Indonesia's capital, Jakarta. His installation specializes in green tree pythons. He was permitted the export of two thousand of these reptiles in 2015, but he was also authorized to trade in 45 other species, including critically endangered Sulawesi forest turtles and rare tricolour monitors.

He admitted having no idea why the government gave him permission to export these animals and went so far as to deny ever having sold them, for he had no license to breed or maintain them. The head of Indonesia's captive breeding at the Ministry of the Environment and Forestry explains that his country's quota list is regulated firmly, based on scientific data and that regional forestry officials monthly visit each farm for the purpose of counting breeding adults. The figures they acquire are then used to formalize export quotas ensuring sustainability.

Wild carpet pythons (Morelia spilota) are traded on a legal quota system, but researchers say the quota is often exceeded. Photo courtesy of Jessica Lyons.

A recent study in Conservation Biology however, suggests the number Mr. Wirasena gave of ten percent "laundering" underestimates the problem greatly. Indonesia's quotas, the authors discovered, for 99 of 129 species had been calculated based on biologically impossible parameters. "I know sometimes the traders bribe my staff", Mr. Wiranto, director general of conservation of natural resources and ecosystems said.

In the United States, bearded dragons represent the most commonly sold lizards and there they are captive-bred, all likely descendants of specimens originally smuggled out of Australia. This is seen as a positive turn since the offsprings' availability as captive-bred animals may have resulted in the prevention of animals in the wild being removed. Further, according to some in the field, the pet trade's impact on many species is in fact, negligible.

A study conducted by Daniel Natusch, a herpetologist, conducted in Indonesia, showed that even though pythons were harvested, their numbers and size remained consistent over a two-decade period of study. "We can't only point fingers at Asia and Africa", observed Sandra Alther, a founder of Pro Wildlife, a Munich-based conservation group, "if we're one of the main destinations".

Illegally traded lizards (left to right): black tree monitor (Varanus beccarii), Reisinger’s tree monitor (Varanus reisingeri), emerald monitor (Varanus prasinus), and the blue-spotted tree monitor (Varanus macraei). Photo courtesy of Jessica Lyons

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)

"This year, Canada contributed $500-million to the replenishment of the Gavi Vaccine Alliance's fund. Canada is also one of the leading donors to the Global Fund to Fight AIDs, Tuberculosis and Malaria, which has provided antiretroviral therapy to over six million people living with HIV in developing countries."
Stephen Cornish, executive director, Doctors Without Borders Canada

"Now, thanks to a retroactive examination of the usefulness condition -- established in 2010 by the Canadian Federal Court of Appeals -- a patent must meet heightened requirements for usefulness. "
"...This look[s] like industrial policy for Canadian generic drug producers who now can receive the unpatented formula at no cost once the patent is revoked [due to the 'Promise Doctrine' where patents under Canadian law must perform the action they promise to do]."
"...Innovative pharmaceutical companies suffered more than $1.1-billion in lost sales from the premature termination of patents in Canada."
Michelle Wein, trade policy analyst, Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, Washington

"The U.S. should drop its demand in the Trans-Pacific Partnership talks that its trading partners respect a rule giving the American pharmaceutical industry 12 years of exclusive rights to its patents. Even Europe allows shorter time spans."
Caroline Freund, The Japan Times

 

Ah, Hawaii, a lovely place to visit, particularly by those who live in northern climates. It's one of Barack Obama's favourite getaways, nostalgic for the past, isn't it? And it is there that closed door negotiations have been taking place in a hotel where representatives of a dozen countries are working on hammering out a collective trade agreement that will impact the lives of an estimated 800 million people, representing 40 percent of the global economy.


Image above: From (http://hawaiiindependent.net/story/whats-in-the-leaked-tpp-chapter).

Ten Pacific Rim countries as well as the United States and now Canada are in negotiations for a final agreement to consolidate the collective trade agreement known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).  The partnership members also include, Australia, Mexico, New Zealand, Japan, Peru, Chile, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam and Brunei Darussalam. And all of these countries are anticipating that this partnership will be of immense export-trade value to them all.

The issues under discussion range from government procurement, investment, intellectual property, services, dispute settlement, goods, trade and environment, all the way to the really contentious issue of governments providing subsidies to protected industries in for example, agricultural production or manufactured goods. Take, for example, the U.S. where President Obama wishes Congress to grant him authority to fasttrack the TPP on his own initiative.

Something like his personal decision as chief of the executive branch of government in the U.S. to decide to veto the XL pipeline, reflecting his personal distaste for Canada's "dirty oil", his decision paying homage to many of those who brought him to public office at the highest level; to name but one constituency: environmentalists. Of course electing a president of the United States is a costly affair and there were also others instrumental in funding his presidency campaign.

One of the critical issues at stake in the TPP agreement being worked on coming courtesy of leaks from the TPP draft text is that some governments are angling to dismantle public-health safeguards reflecting international law, to extend the time limits permitting brand-name medicines' protection under patent. The effect of such extensions would result in monopolistic protection, ensuring that generic drug manufacturers must wait longer to produce less expensive versions of the patent-protected medicines.

The cost of immunizing a child with World Health Organization recommended vaccines has grown 6,700% since 2001, according to Doctors Without Borders. Stricter intellectual property rules the TPP is negotiating are guaranteed to further limit competition by maintaining artificially high prices, thus keeping these life-saving vaccines out of reach of those who most need them. Generic competition levels the price-field, ensuring all who need these drugs a better opportunity to obtain them.

Donor-supported global health institutions along with Doctors Without Borders have a heavy reliance on affordable, quality generic medicines to enable them to  fulfill 85% of their programming for health-provision initiatives. Proposals by the United States and a few other countries in the TPP could limit the effectiveness of these humanitarian organizations' programs, diverting resources from patient care where it is most needed.

Drug expenditures in Canada have been steadily growing in the last 25 years, consuming an ever-greater portion of tax dollars in health care. Prescription drug costs have doubled from the mid-1980s to 2012. Canada and other countries are actively opposing some of the most potentially harmful provisions in the TPP agreement.

A petition at www.msf.ca/tpp calling on Canada to resist pressure and stand up against the U.S. move to prolong patent monopolies for years, has resulted in over 32,000 signatures. It would be most unfortunate if the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement resulted in passage of the move by the United States to protect its pharmaceutical industries' bottom line. The long-term harmful impact on people who rely on less expensive, reliable versions of drugs they need to continue life, would be immeasurable.

This would deleteriously impact affordable health care in all the countries affected. And it would restrict access to medicines for millions of people in developing countries. Pharmaceutical companies, with such patent extension would be enabled to charge higher prices for longer periods of time, restricting access to affordable generic medicines. Those who can least afford to pay will be penalized disproportionately, but at the government level public health care will also be impacted.

The pharmaceutical lobby and their resourceful forward-thinking in helping to elect a president who will aid their bottom line places in question the character and independent thought to benefit an international populace and not a broad spectrum of name-drug manufacturers speaking volumes about the values and priorities of those in positions of power.

Splittist Dog

"I want to meet with the public. [If leaders like U.S. President Barack Obama] are willing to meet me, I'm happy. Otherwise I don't want to create any inconvenience, that's not my purpose. There's no reason for disappointment. My main interest or commitment is promotion of human values."
"It seems that the more accusations from the Chinese government, the more popularity for me. When I visit different places, if the Chinese government remained silent, then the press may not pay much attention. When the Chinese protest, you pay more attention."
"Norway, a smaller country, you can do more. Norway, a smaller (country), can make a significant contribution. This is my view."
Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama

Dalai Lama stands with chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee Thorbjorn Jagland, right, and deputy chairwoman Kaci Kullmann Five from the Nobel Peace Prize committee, in Oslo, Wednesday May 7, 2014. Norway's decision to shun the Dalai Lama during his visit to Oslo this week has left a sour taste for a country that prides itself in being a beacon of human rights in the world. Unlike on his previous visits to Norway, no government officials will meet the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Tibetan spiritual leader, who arrived in Oslo on Wednesday for a three-day stay. (AP Photo/Heiko Junge, NTB Scanpix)

The government of Norway decided to opt for caution rather than to publicly bring notice to themselves honouring the presence in Oslo of the revered Tibetan holy man, the Dalai Lama. The concern was that China would be enraged. And enraging China would not auger well for the sale of North Sea oil to that energy-consumption Colossus. Though China represents Norway's sixth-largest trading partner, evidently Norway is so greedy for trade it doesn't much mind trading morals for money.

Its 'morals', however, come into full display at certain times against certain other countries. Take Israel, for example, whom Norway is in full throttle of slamming with a robustly sanctimonious boycott-divestment program, snubbing its former friendly relations with the Jewish state. And it is past interesting to note that Hanne Nabintu Herland, a noted Norwegian author and historian of religion had this to say about her country:

"The degree of anti-Israelism in Norway today on the state level, in the media, in the trade unions and at the universities, colleges and schools is unprecedented in modern Norwegian history. The powerful individuals that have pushed for these negative and biased attitudes in Norway are today responsible for creating a politically-correct hatred towards Israel that today portrays my country internationally as the most anti-Semitic country in the West."

But setting Israel aside it is at present Norway's treatment of the Dalai Lama that has been placed under the microscope of detecting craven cynicism in the affair of shunning personal contact with the spiritual leader whose self-imposed exile from Tibet was forced upon him by the Chinese authorities who regarded him as a "splittest", intent on sundering that ancient country from the geography of China which had invaded it and claims it as part of China. China values "harmony" and harmonious relations within China its goal, forcefully hammering down protest against its human rights abuses.

When Norway's Nobel committee awarded jailed Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo the Peace Prize in 2010, China broke off government high-level and diplomatic contacts with Norway, straining trade relations, disrupting salmon exports from Norway and pitting the world's second-largest economy against Western Europe's largest oil exporter. Norway's Foreign Minister Boerge Brenda last month stated that his country needs "to focus on our relationship with China", and accordingly it would become "difficult to normalize our relationship with China", should the government officially recognize the Dalai Lama.

"Normalize" relations with China? Does that then mean that China's aggression toward its South China Sea neighbours, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, Vietnam should be overlooked? China, after all, has authorized its ships to ram and water-cannon Vietnamese vessels attempting to stop Beijing from setting up a huge oil rig in the South China Sea where Vietnam claims sovereignty. If the government of Norway is agonizing over its Nobel committee's choices over which the government has no control, it might consider returning that privilege to Sweden, and then it would face no further problems with China over the granting of the Peace Prize.

The Dalai Lama's visit to Oslo this week coincided with the 25th anniversary of his having received the Nobel Peace Prize. When jailed Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo became a laureate in 2010 it was in recognition of his struggles for peace within a country whose human rights record was, is, and will remain for the foreseeable future abysmal. The Dalai Lama fled his country to preserve his life. Since then hundreds of thousands of Tibetans have died, resulting from China's anti-human-rights policies. 

Norway is sufficiently venal to overlook such inconveniences in favour of currying a place in China's esteem as a reliable trading partner.

Last year, Zhao Jun, China's ambassador to Norway made it perfectly clear that no headway could be made without Norway back-tracking in its humble support of human rights. China's ambassador stated outright that the Nordic country has a need to proffer the first apologetic move, pledging never to again cross "red policy lines", and then the diplomatic freeze that had been imposed on Norway after the granting of the prize to its jailed dissident would be lifted.

In quietly chiding the newly (2013) elected government of Norway, the Dalai Lama was making allusion to his meeting earlier in 2014 with American President Barack Obama in defiance of the Chinese government's lodging of a formal diplomatic protest, warning that diplomatic relations between the United States and China would be deleteriously impacted. The Dalai Lama pointed out that large country or small, each makes a choice to uphold human rights or to withhold their support for fear of losing financial traction.

Norway has established its hypocritical choice.

Understanding the Ban

"They could have more understanding from our side of the picture, especially with propaganda used when they say we are clubbing baby seals when in fact the sale of whitecoats (baby seals) has been banned for over 20 years."
"They're going to still go hunting. They always will, we always have. But it does affect them economically -- that's one way a lot of our hunters make a living."
"It is okay for us to eat hamburgers and cows and pigs when they are raised in slaughterhouses and they have very small quarters, and it's done with no regard for the animal's life. I think there is a huge prejudice there, and it is really unfair."
"There is a direct link between the people that hunt it, the people that eat it, and the people that wear it. One seal will feed many families and it is within our tradition to share our meat and share our food with other families."
"The seal skin shirt that I am wearing -- I know who made it. I know that it wasn't made in a sweat shop. I know that [those who made it] were given money for it and their kids were fed."
Terrie Kusugak, Inuit student protester

"The European Union is concerned about the animal welfare aspects of the seal hunt. Doubts have been expressed about some of the methods used for hunting seals, such as shooting, netting and clubbing, that can cause avoidable pain and distress."
European Commission's Environment Directorate-General statement

"It's like you are outside, you are not equal with others."
"When we catch the seal, we eat the meat, use the fat, use the skins for clothing and we use the bones in our arts and so on. We use all the seal, nothing is wasted."
Icelandic Inuit Jens Olsen

Canada and Norway are appealing to the European Union to rescind its ban against seal products, a ban that has impacted deleteriously on Canadian and Norwegian seal hunters, as well as those who have traditionally hunted seals elsewhere in the world, in a once-vibrant trade, now in decline as a result of the impassioned propaganda campaign of environmentalists and animal-welfare activists.

Inuit students pose in sealskin jackets during a rally on Parliament Hill Tuesday March 18, 2014 in Ottawa. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld

 

In hopes of helping to counteract the effects of anti-seal activism, Inuit from Canada and Greenland held a fashion show in front of Parliament Hill in Ottawa, speaking publicly of the difficulties they face as a result of a ban supposedly exempting them, but which in fact does not. The ban has destroyed the once-thriving market, and makes no exceptions in the marketplace for anyone.

An Inuit student from Nunavut shows off a seal skin jacket and boots during a fashion show/protest on Parliament Hill, March 18, 2014. (Matthew Little/Epoch Times)

Propaganda, hysterical and slanderous at times reveals a cultural bias that harms Inuit hunters and communities reliant on seal hunting throughout their history who have attempted to participate in the modern world's cash economy to pursue a living wage for themselves and their families. They hold out high hopes that Canada and Norway manage to succeed in their appeal to the World Trade Organization to have the ban overturned.

In acknowledgement that the Inuit have economic and social interests in the seal hunt the EU granted them limited ban exemptions. Ignoring the effect of the ban in destroying the seal products market. A move that the protesters speak of as hypocrisy and cultural bias, stigmatizing seal products, and in effect the people who hunt and harvest and create the products.

Hunters have lost their income as a result of the ban. Lower prices for meat and sealskin have resulted from the ban, making it difficult for Inuit to support their families. Even while the EU recognizes that the species of seal hunted in Canada, Norway and Namibia in Southern African (where in fact 60% of seal products originate) are not endangered, it is the methods of the hunt they claim to take exception to.

This, despite assurances from Canadian authorities that the methods used to kill the animals are humane, guaranteed to deliver instant death, and that no pain to the animal results from the process. And where the great wide world accepts the conditions that prevail in abattoirs the world over, and where in commercial animal husbandry no such concerns for the welfare of the animals humans eat every day are expressed.