IFAW -International Fund for Animal Welfare

In 2008, IFAW worldwide funding was down to 99 million dollars from 111 million dollars in 2007. Afraid of another funding drop this year (2009), IFAW has cranked up their fundraising efforts early this year. The Canadian seal hunt is IFAW's biggest money earner and inspite of it's being more then 4 months away, the IFAW is on the fundraising trail. Protesting against the Canadian seal hunt is big business today. It is estimated that in 2007, three hundred million dollars was raised.

From the beginning, the seal hunt controversy has been a staged affair. Photos and videos of a bloody abattoir on the ice have been powerfully exploited to build comfortable financial empires for the IFAW. The Canadian seal protest movement is a sophisticated and very profitable industry. Their aim is publicity and revenue just like any other business. Every year they mount their seal hunt campaign, and the money rolls in. Honesty is not a requirement.

The once-a-year harvesting of predatory seals in a limited, controlled and monitored situation is no different than the slaughtering of beef cattle for our steaks or lobster for our plates. Why are people so sympathetic to seals and so indifferent to their legitimate balance-of-nature hunters? Because they've been duped. IFAW has conned you.

Sheryl Fink is a Senior Research and Projects Specialist working out of the Guelph (Canada) office of the International Fund for Animal Welfare. Trained and schooled in the effective use of propaganda, she specializes in using images and video of animals in distress for the purpose of soliciting donations. Emotional pitches and half truths are their bread and butter of IFAW and they do not want anyone tampering with their cash cow. According to the Canadian government, the harp seal population, as of last year, sits at 5.6 million seals off the east coast of Canada with close to 8 million worldwide. With such a huge amount of harp seals in the world, I will expect that Sheryl Fink is going to make a great deal of money this year for IFAW.

One of the first things you will learn is that IFAW is blatantly misleading the public on the topic of the Atlantic seal hunt. Seal hunt becomes seal slaughter, 8 million harp seals becomes harp seals are going extinct. Now this is how one effectively uses propaganda to make money. This is what IFAW is taught. All over the net one can see people holding a white seal pup. It's against Canadian law to hunt the white seal pups. But once again, the white seal pup photo is used to get people's wallets to fly open and donate. Young harp seals are cute, have large eyes, are fluffy, white and cuddly. They can trigger the empathetic and infant-protection instincts easily in people. The photographs of the white seal pup has to be used to fundraise. How many are going to donate if a grey colored seal photo is used? The scandal about all this is that so many nice old ladies, so many well-meaning animal lovers, so many decent people have been suckered into sending cash and to organizations like IFAW that thrive on this misplaced concern for big-eyed, fish-eating seals.

In short, Sheryl Fink's job is to use people's emotions against them in order to fleece them out of money. How this lady can sleep at night is beyond me. In 2007, a seal species was officially declared extinct. Caribbean monk seal is gone forever. Sheryl Fink and the IFAW said and did nothing about it. In fact they are not ever aware of it. You can't make any money out of a extinct seal species so instead they protest for Canadian harp seal, the most numerous marine mammal on the planet.