Apr 19 2005 CBC News

ST. JOHN'S, NFLD  —  A senior member of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society – which has spent the last month campaigning against the East Coast seal hunt – says violence is necessary to bring the seal industry to an end.

Jerry Vlasak, a long-time board member of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, has even gone so far in the past as to endorse assassination as a means to save animal life – views that have prompted British authorities from barring him entry to their country.

Earlier this month, Vlasak protested the spring hunt off the Magdalen Islands.

"I was punched in the face by a sealer with his bare knuckles while I was trying to have a rational conversation," he said.

However, it was Vlasak who was charged with interfering with the seal hunt – and it is not his only cause.

A California physician, Vlasak has spoken on behalf of such groups as the Animal Liberation Front, which is considered a terrorist threat by the FBI.

Vlasak once told an animal rights conference that killing research scientists would save lab animals.

"If these vivisectors were being targeted for assassination, and call it political assassination or what have you … strictly from a fear and intimidation factor, that would be an effective tactic," he said.

Such comments were enough to get Vlasak banned from entering Britain last year.

In an interview with CBC, Vlasak did not back down from those views, and said sealers are in the same league as animal researchers.

"Are these people comparable to people that chop up animals in laboratories just to further their academic careers? Yeah, I think they're all abhorrent in a certain way, yes," he said.

"The threat of violence would be another way to stop them and I would be behind that threat."

David Martosko, a Washington researcher who tracks groups like the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, says Vlasak represents a dangerous side of the animal rights movement.

"They are not animal welfarists, they're animal liberationists," he says.

"That's a very, very dangerous philosophy to espouse, especially if you're willing cross the line into violence to achieve it."

While British officials have barred Vlasak from entering their country, Canadian authorities knew nothing about him or the violence he endorses.

Vlasak will be back in Canada in the coming months to fight charges laid at the seal hunt.

Comments

Sealing protests turned me off environme Written by suz on 2005-04-28 13:34:11 Good food for thought     In Montreal - in the mid-late nineties -there were tons of middle-upper middle class white kids in the city protesting sealing.  This was largely what turned me off environmentalism - the disregard of environmentalists for people - and especially for people who are economically marginalised or dependent on natural resource extraction.    Some of the commuities who have historically engaged in commercial sealing live in very remote areas where sealing is their only means of cash income.     A geographer from McGill (if only I could remember his name!) wrote a book - about how the ban on furs - as a result of the environmental lobby by urban environmentalists (not on science - or threat to the seal population) - had the effecting of devestating many First Nations communities in Labrador.   It is a sad book - that definitely made me think about the classism and racism within environmentalism.

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