Violent Seal Killers Threaten Sea Shepherd UK Crew

April 21 2014 As pre­dict­ed by Sea Shep­herd on Good Fri­day, the killing team of the Scot­tish Wild Salmon Com­pa­ny esca­lat­ed ten­sions in the Scot­tish seal killing grounds with an unprece­dent­ed attack on a mem­ber of Sea Shep­herd UK’s cam­paign crew.

As res­i­dents of Gar­den­stown were prepar­ing for break­fast on East­er Mon­day, Sea Shep­herd crewmem­bers were already being threat­ened with vio­lence by the Scot­tish Wild Salmon Company’s seal killers.

In a dra­mat­ic 8 a.m. con­fronta­tion which took place away from the Har­bour in the town’s New Ground, three employ­ees of the Scot­tish Wild Salmon Com­pa­ny, one car­ry­ing a rifle, cor­nered just one of our crewmem­bers, leav­ing him fear­ful of extreme vio­lence.

 

The crewmem­ber had the pres­ence of mind to keep his cam­era run­ning through­out, and the sit­u­a­tion was saved when oth­er mem­bers of the Sea Shep­herd cam­paign crew arrived with their own cam­eras. Real­iz­ing that any fur­ther ille­gal acts on their part were being record­ed, the thugs backed away and returned to their com­mand base.

Sea Shep­herd UK has now report­ed the sit­u­a­tion and shown video footage to Police Scot­land. Sea Shep­herd UK is con­fi­dent that charges can now be brought against the ring­leader of the Scot­tish Wild Salmon Company’s out-of-con­trol thugs.

Giv­en the esca­lat­ing sit­u­a­tion, Sea Shep­herd UK has now asked the Hunt Sabo­teurs Asso­ci­a­tion to reac­ti­vate their under­cov­er teams as well as intro­duce new covert oper­a­tives to the area. Oth­er Sea Shep­herd vol­un­teers and spe­cial­ist inter­ven­tion teams are also now head­ing to Banff­shire in order to defend Scot­tish seals from these vio­lent peo­ple.

The Scot­tish gov­ern­ment issues com­pa­nies such as the Scot­tish Wild Salmon Com­pa­ny with licens­es to shoot seals, which they claim threat­en fish stocks. How­ev­er the leg­is­la­tion requires that seals may only ever be shot as a last resort after all oth­er meth­ods of con­trol have been applied. The actions of these com­pa­nies them­selves are draw­ing seals to the salmon. Seals in this area do not nor­mal­ly eat salmon, but when salmon net­ting com­pa­nies trap wild fish in large num­bers, it is only nat­ur­al that the cap­tured fish attract seals.  As we’ve seen with the sea lions on the Colum­bia Riv­er on the Oregon/Washington bor­der here in the U.S., these ani­mals are being tar­get­ed for the sim­ple “crime” of eat­ing fish.

The non-lethal solu­tion is to deploy Acoustic Deter­rent Devices (ADDs), which the Scot­tish Wild Salmon Com­pa­ny does have avail­able to them.  Unfor­tu­nate­ly, lethal bul­lets are cheap­er than the non-lethal alter­na­tive, and so, with­out effec­tive polic­ing by Marine Scot­land (the agency respon­si­ble for the seal killing licens­es), it is left to Sea Shep­herd to once again uphold nation­al and inter­na­tion­al laws which gov­ern­ments nei­ther can’t nor won’t enforce.