by PATRICK LEJTENYI

Lisa Shalom’s life took a turn for the weird last March 31. Aboard the good ship Farley Mowat with a crew of anti-sealing activists from the Sea Shepherd conservation group, the 23-year-old Montrealer was nearly stuck in an ice floe off the Magdalen Islands. Nearby, a ship was collecting a group of sealers walking along the ice, apparently without cargo. Shalom and a group of 15 or so Sea Shepherd activists decided to do what they came north to do: confront them.

They crossed the ice “to talk,” she says, but soon, “all hell broke loose.” About a dozen sealers emerged from their ship. A shouting match ensued, and some sealers swung at the activists with their hakapiks, a three-foot-long wooden handle with a spike on the end, used to pierce the skull and crush the brains of cute baby seals. Some punches were thrown, and at least four Sea Shepherd crew members were bloodied.

“I remember one of them saying, ‘Don’t you fuck with me, girl,’” says Shalom.

An RCMP helicopter, circling overhead to monitor sealing activities, saw the fracas and descended. Shalom and 10 other Sea Shepherd members were then promptly arrested for violating the Seal Protection Act. She was put aboard a Coast Guard cutter and away they sailed for Prince Edward Island, where she spent the night in a cell before being identified as a Canadian (the only one among the 11 arrested) and released—without money or proper clothes. She says the RCMP reneged on a promise to return her to her ship, and she only got back by hitching a ride with a U.S. Humane Society helicopter. She later returned to Montreal to work on a documentary about the hunt, which she’s editing now.

Constitutional killing?

Shalom is now going through the long process of dealing with the courts. But she’s gone on the offensive. According to her, federal regulations, the so-called Seal Protection Act, forbids non-sealers from approaching sealers who are engaged in sealing activities. She says she didn’t see the seal carcass one of the men was carrying, and that she never intentionally broke the law. But she has challenged the constitutionality of the Act. She expects a verdict will be delivered in Charlottetown, PEI, on Friday, Dec. 9. Shalom says that if the judge allows the trial to continue, she’ll reappear in court on Dec. 15 to face criminal charges.

The case against her, she says, is “borderline.” But, she admits, “We were more interested in witnessing the atrocity despite the consequences so we could gain a perspective and insight on sealing. But we were respecting the law—but in the opinion of the RCMP, we were in breach of the Seal Protection Act.”

Shalom herself may have gotten what she set out for: She says that, early in her activist career, she soon tired of the endless meetings and theorizing. “I wanted more rock, less talk,” she says. She spent 10 months aboard the Farley Mowat in 2002 and decided that she “wanted to bring to light the realities of the seal slaughter. I thought it’d be a good use of my time.”

For the record, Mother Nature may have done more to halt the seal slaughter this year than any intervention by activists. This year’s hunt, which was limited to 320,000 seals, marked the third of a three-year federal plan to cull up to 975,000 seals, out of an estimated population of over five million. According to the Canadian Press, heavy winds and high seas forced more than half of the 70 sealing ships to turn back before the season ended.