ARAN's Rally Against Canada's Seal Slaughter - Report

dublin | animal rights | news report Friday March 24, 2006 13:24 by John Carmody - Animal Rights Action Network (ARAN) arancampaigns at eircom dot net ARAN Po Box 722 Kildare, Ireland 087-6275579

People Speak Out Against Animal Cruelty

Today’s demonstration against the Canadian seal hunt went great, better than expected! We had a wonderful turn out, people just kept coming and going from 12noon til 2pm today Thursday March 23rd 2006! Volunteers from ARAN came from Limerick, Galway, Sligo, Meath and joined with our friends in Dublin! Many other caring people could not make it due to work commitments but called, written and emailed the Canadian embassy on the day, we also had a wonderful member of the Canadian public at this demo too and she now speaks out against this hunt and much more on animal cruelty.

This demo is now in its fourth year that ARAN has organized outside the Canadian embassy and up until now we like so many others have being calling on Canadian government to end the seal slaughter, but it looks like after 40 years this is not happening! So today’s demonstration we focused directly on highlighting the boycott of Canadian seafood, we had fabulous placards reading “DON”T BUY CANADIAN SEA FOOD” and we chanted this also along with a really noisy megaphone.

To top things off media attention was great too. Prior to doing the demo we done several radio interviews on many Dublin FM radio stations and today we done interviews on many more including International Network News which sells stories to other radio stations. We were also lucky enough to have reporters from Independent News, Press Association Ireland which sells to major media outlets, Southside people, Northside People and East people newspapers and other freelance reporters! During the radio interviews and interviews with reporters from the newspapers we continued to promote the boycott of Canadian seafood and stressed that ARAN has now identified that Ireland imports about $170,000 worth of Canadian seafood and that we are working on highlighting the restaurants that sell this and encourage the restaurants that sell the seafood to stop. We also spoke about the huge boycott in the USA and the UK right now and urged members of the public to come out and speak out against the slaughter and to stop animal cruelty. Maybe this will be the only chance we have of ending this brutal massacre of defenseless marine wildlife.

Thanks to everyone who turned up, you made this demonstration happen and you’re making a huge difference!