The World Peace Diet: Eating For Spiritual Health And Social Harmony

104 / the world peace diet
in the Bering Sea, for example, is less than twenty percent of what it
was in the 1950s. Besides stealing their food supply, fishers or their
agents kill many of these creatures because they are seen as competition
for the ever-decreasing number of fish in the over-fished ocean
waters. The Canadian Department of Fisheries subsidizes the yearly
spring slaughter of seal pups on the ice floes of eastern Canada—the
brutal and bloody bludgeoning and shooting to death each year of
over 300,000 helpless baby seals by local fishermen. 24 In recent years,
the government has actually raised the limit on the number of seals
that can be killed; the Newfoundland minister of fisheries has proclaimed
his hope that the seals will be completely eliminated, because
he believes they threaten Canada’s fishing industry. 25 Biologists who
have studied the situation report that the main threat to the fishing
industry is its own rapacity, not the seals; there aren’t enough young
fish surviving the fishing nets to replenish the stocks. Iceland candidly
justifies its killing of whales as a necessary step to protect its commercial
fishing industry.
Cormorants and other water birds are hunted, trapped, and killed by
both government agencies and private interests because of their perceived
competition with fishers and the fishing industry. At least twenty thousand
dolphins are killed each year by the tuna industry. Because dolphins
tend to swim above schools of tuna, fishing operations use them to find
tuna, and dolphins inevitably end up drowning in the nets. There is no
oversight on many tuna fishing operations, and Galapagos National Park
personnel, for example, caught a tuna seiner with its net deployed within
park boundaries on May 3, 2002, with over fifty dead and dying dolphins
and just eight tuna. Virtually no punishment was imposed. 26 Sharks
are now being killed by the tens of thousands simply for their fins. They
are hauled in, their fins chopped off, and their bodies thrown back into
the water to die slow, agonizing deaths. 27 Sometimes their spines are also
slit to remove the cartilage that is sold in health food stores as a cancer
remedy; this has been shown to have little effect other than as a placebo,
but still the sharks die for it. Some species, such as swordfish and
grouper, are approaching extinction in the wild, as are most sea turtle
species, drowned in the nets used by commercial shrimp trawlers.