Sea Shepherd Society

What do you think of the confiscation of the boat by the Coast Guard? Do you support these environmentalists? Are they real dogooders or simply in the business of making money on the backs of environmental issues?

I think that they were continually warned to stay a certain distance away so as not to endanger the sealers. Whether or not you are for the sealers plying their trade, it is not good to risk their lives preventing them from doing so.

They were told that they would be boarded if they kept it up, and they still did so. If they had not been boarded, it would have opened the floodgates and everyone else would start doing what they were doing since they would realize that nothing would happen to them.

If they were in Canadian territorial waters and breaking the law, good for the government for intervening and bringing them in.

I don't know enough about the law of the sea to know what to say if they were in international waters when this happened but I would hope and expect Canada to conduct itself in a lawful manner.

For our purposes, international waters is beyond the 200 mile Exclusive Economic Zone. The Law of the Sea gives us the right to legislate activities within that 200 mile zone. It doesn't matter if the vessel was inside 12 miles, or inside 200 miles. Of course they were within that 200 mile zone. Sealers don't venture out that far. For one, that's not where the whelping areas are. Second, we have no jurisdiction there.

Is Paul Watson and his group a cult? Are they the Waco of the Seas? I can't believe that anything could ever appease these obsessive people.

They openly gloat about sinking five whaling vessels. They're militant to the core.

I wasn't sure where the seizure took place, but I see from their own website it happened in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. That's actually our territorial waters, not the EEZ, not that it matters.

If you go --, you can see clear footage, from their own video no less, of them well within the half nautical mile limit of sealers set for those without a permit to observe.

If they really wanted to stop the hunt why not collect loads of cash and pay the hunters more not to hunt than they make from hunting? Seems much easier with all the money they have to buy ships and crew to pay for not hunting.

This group is scum who don't have any real care about their cause except to use it to get on TV and in the news and it seems as though their mentality is set to the logic that so long as they get media on themselves (Good or Bad) they bring awareness to their plight.

.... brings more awareness to their stupidity if you ask me.

They should have truly rammed their ship, taken out their engines, drift them out to international waters and then execute each one of them to Davy Jones locker.... but that's just me.

In a few more weeks, this won't matter anymore and they will be off bugging some other outfit..perhaps the Japanese whaling fleet, but the Japanese have guns,too.

Probably a good idea. I have read different figures on the amount of money raised by the Sea Shepherd Society. The lowest was around twenty million dollars annually. Since the seal hunters make a good deal less than that, why not?