Flattery or deception

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.antiguasun.com/paper/?as=view&sun=281935077507132005&an=200621056806242006&ac=Opinion

Flattery or deception

Saturday June 24 2006

Dear Editor,

I wish it were true that Dan Goodman, the only westerner in the Japanese delegation at the International Whaling Commission (IWC) meetings, was American. But he is not. (Letter “I have been inside a place like hell” – June 21 2006)

Unfortunately, Dan Goodman is Canadian and a former senior federal fisheries officer, the very one who for two decades led the Canadian delegation at the IWC where he made sure that every vote cast by the government of Canada was pro-whaling and against conservation.

Canada was a founding member of the IWC, but when the pro-conservation global moratorium on whaling was adopted in the 80s, Dan Goodman managed to get Canada to renounce its membership to the IWC in protest.

Right after that, Dan Goodman quit his position as fisheries officer in Canada and got a job with the Japanese whaling industry – where he happily continues to promote commercial whaling at the IWC.

Canada is now the only developed country in the world that continues to kill whales outside the authority of the IWC, only to make a political point.

Canada’s infamous federal fisheries department is also the force behind the largest marine mammal hunt in the world, which happens every year off the East Coast of Canada.

For the last 30 years, millions of seal pups have been clubbed to death, their red blood splattered over the white ice flows like the colours on the Canadian flag.

The enormous amount of national and international protests that this crime to nature brings every year, has not only been unsuccessful in curbing the Canadian government’s thirst for blood, but instead death quotas on marine mammals only continue to increase.

Canada’s government has the same warped mentality as the other whaling countries at the IWC.

They have no shame.

Sincerely,

Annelise Sorg, Director

Canadian Marine Environment Protection Society.