Alistair Darling Refuses to Eat Seal Meat at G7 Meeting

Alistair Darling, the UK's Chancellor of the Exchequer, is in Canada for a G-7 meeting. He refused to eat the seal meat that the local Inuit community offered to the meeting participants, instead eating Arctic char. Good for him!

Real emotional blackmail on the part of the Canadians. They're basically making participants choose between eating seal meat or pissing off the Inuits and risk being called racists. The Canadians are just using its native peoples as a guilt rod.

Stay classy Canada!

The Inuit Point of View on Polar Bears

Here's an article in the Nunatsiaq News that talks about polar bear conservation from the Inuit point of view. The Inuit harvest, or hunt, polar bears in Canada.

"In the past, Inuit always considered the WWF Canada as our friend," {Nunavut Tunngavik Inc.'s director of wildlife, Gabriel Nirlinguyak} said, recalling that the two had cooperated on bowhead whale management issues. "But not with polar bears."

He said that a lot of Inuit feel betrayed by the animal rights movement, and by some biologists when it comes to polar bears.

{World Wildlife Fund's polar bear point man Peter Ewins} has been calling loud and long for more restrictions on the harvesting of polar bears, particularly in Baffin Bay and Hudson Bay.

The polar bear is the WWF's poster animal in its campaign against global climate change, said Nirlungayuk, and "the Inuit are caught in the middle."