Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
French film star Brigitte Bardot travels to Ottawa next week hoping to lobby Prime Minister Stephen Harper to end Canada's seal hunting, her foundation announced Friday.
The longtime animal rights activist last came here in 1977 and kicked off three decades of protests against the seal hunt by hugging a fluffy white doe-eyed pup on an ice floe for photographers.
Her return to Ottawa in poor health comes after Canada's fisheries minister extended the hunt Wednesday to 2010 and set a kill quota of a 325,000 animals this year, prompting protests in France and the United States.
Officials in the prime minister's office told AFP they were unaware of Bardot's visit.
"As far as I know, we have not received a request to meet with the prime minister. We'll consider it when we receive it or if we receive it," a spokesman for Harper said.
Earlier this week, Bardot sent a scathing open letter to Harper denouncing the hunt.
"Prime minister, you make me embarrassed to belong to a race incapable of even the smallest amount of compassion or the slightest bit of humanity towards living creatures that are innocent victims," she wrote.
"I can only despise a man who does not have the courage to use his powers to stop a massacre that the world condemns."
Last month, former Beatle Paul McCartney and his wife visited an ice floe in the Gulf of St. Lawrence to spotlight the "brutal" hunt and hoped to speak to Harper by telephone afterwards, but were shunned.
Singer Charles Aznavour and actors Kim Basinger, Juliette Binoche and Richard Dean Anderson, among many others, also have campaigned against the hunt over the years.
A Canadian senator countered criticisms Friday by saying the seal hunt is nothing compared to "the daily massacre of innocent people in Iraq" and the United States' "destabilization of the entire world".
Senator Celine Hervieux-Payette made the comments in response to an angry letter from an American family saying they would cancel their Canadian vacation to protest the "horrible" and "inhumane" hunt.
"The daily massacre of innocent people in Iraq, the execution of people -- especially so many African-Americans -- in US prisons, the sale of handguns to American citizens, the destabilization of the entire world by the United States' aggressive foreign policy," these are truly "horrible", she said.
amc/kd
AFPEntertainment-Canada-animal-film-seal-people-Bardot
AFP 172257 GMT 03 06
COPYRIGHT 2004 Agence France-Presse. All rights reserved.
