[New post] Advocate for shooting seals turns to pushing hunt for Sasquatch
Merritt Clifton posted: " But pregnant seals are still getting shot GREENBANK, Washington––The hunt for whoever is shooting harbor seals, apparently from a boat, along the west side of Whidbey Island, Washington, intertwines with the hunt for the mythical Sasquatch, but no" Animals 24-7
GREENBANK, Washington––The hunt for whoever is shooting harbor seals, apparently from a boat, along the west side of Whidbey Island, Washington, intertwines with the hunt for the mythical Sasquatch, but no, Sasquatch is not shooting seals, nor is Sasquatch in any danger of being shot.
Yet another pregnant harbor seal, likely killed by a deer slug fired from a shotgun at close range, washed ashore at Hidden Beach on February 28, 2023, six miles from where two pregnant harbor seals were found shotgunned to death at Dines Point on January 24, 2023.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Protected species
Alerted by a neighbor, ANIMALS 24-7 located and examined the remains of the Hidden Beach seal only hours after the shooting.
The seal was shot in a shallow cove frequented by harbor seals, grey whales, otters, bald eagles, murrelets, and migratory waterfowl, seasonally visited by California sea lions.
All are protected by both federal and Washington state law.
Orcas, the most stringently protected local species of all, are often seen from Hidden Beach, but tend to stay a mile or more offshore, in deeper water.
County ordinance, incidentally, prohibits any use of firearms at Hidden Beach.
Only people in boats who cannot read the posting signs could plausibly claim to not know that.
Sasquatch sightings have never been reported anywhere nearby, even by visitors who stop at the Greenbank dope shop on their way to the beach.
The suspected missing link between the dead pregnant seals and the tediously interminable search for Sasquatch, chiefly by tourists to the Olympic peninsula, across Puget Sound, is sometime Kwakwaka'wakw First Nation commercial fisher, seal-shooter for salmon net farms, alleged grave disturber, and current self-proclaimed Sasquatch hunting guide Thomas Sewid.
Marine mammal stranding network volunteer Garry Heinrich & ANIMALS 24-7 editor Merritt Clifton drag shot seal above tide line for necropsy. (Beth Clifton photo)
Opened burial box as watchman/tour guide
Sewid may have first achieved regional notoriety in September 2014, when as a watchman for the Nanwakolas First Nation in British Columbia, Canada, and as a tour guide for Aboriginal Adventures Canada, he was photographed "peering into an open burial box with skeletal remains in clear view," reported Wawmeesh G. Hamilton of Canadian Press.
"The incident happened on a remote island of the Broughton Archipelago between northern Vancouver Island and the B.C. coast," recounted Hamilton. "It set off investigations by the RCMP and the provincial Ministry of Forests, Lands & Natural Resources," and "prompted a sharp rebuke from his own First Nation, the Nanwakolas," who "relieved [Sewid] of his duties as a watchman."
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, however, "concluded an investigation with the potential for charges under the B.C. Heritage & Conservation Act" without recommending charges, Hamilton wrote.
Marine mammal stranding network volunteer Garry Heinrich & ANIMALS 24-7 editor Merritt Clifton tarp shot seal pending necropsy. (Beth Clifton photo)
Buys ammo for seal-shooters
Sewid later founded the so-called Pacific Balance Pinniped Society and the parallel entity Pacific Balance Marine Management.
Sewid since 2017 been actively drumming up marine mammal hatred among fishers in waters long since fished to severe depletion, including, he says, by sending gift cards to help First Nations members willing to shoot seals to shoot more seals.
Sewid evades investigation, and perhaps prosecution, for soliciting violations of the 1972 U.S. Marine Mammal Protection Act because he operates from the Canadian end of the Salish Sea, which includes the Georgia Strait and Fraser River estuary, as well as a portion of Puget Sound, most of which is on the U.S. side of the international boundary.
Lifeforce Foundation founder Peter Hamilton has responded to Sewid with this meme.
No right to shoot seals in U.S. waters
As a First Nations tribal member, Sewid claims a right to kill seals and sea lions for "food, social and ceremonial purposes in British Columbia."
He has no such right in U.S. waters.
Sewid's campaigns to hunt marine mammals have drawn some mass media publicity in recent years, and much scientific refutation, especially after he clashed online with longtime marine mammal defender Paul Watson in 2019.
Sewid more recently clashed with Andrew Trites, director of the Marine Mammal Research Unit at the University of British Columbia, whose 30 years of study demonstrates that the recovery of marine mammals to a fraction of their historical abundance has nothing to do with the collapse of severely overfished salmon and herring stocks.
On January 23, 2023, one day before the Dines Point seals were found shot, Sewid posted to Facebook, "Salmon babies hatching 2023! Seals will soon be sucking them up in the millions throughout the entire Pacific Northwest coast.
"Time to increase seal harvests," Sewid emphasized. "First Nations in British Columbia, I have avenues of funding to help increase your pinniped harvests to help protect salmon."
Specifically, Sewid offered, as he often has, to send gift cards to help seal shooters "get the lead flying."
Sewid had on January 9, 2023 applied for $194,000 from the Canadian government to conduct "research" sealing.
No, there are fortunately not really two of Thomas Sewid. (Beth Clifton collage)
Running out of money
"I had to apply for funding, seeing as we cannot continue onwards in 2023," Sewid complained on Facebook, "unless some form of revenue generation is accessed. Lord knows the call for donations is once again flat-lined and I still owe over $3,000 on my credit card," Sewid said, after he traveled to St. Johns, Newfoundland, in 2022 to promote a British Columbia seal hunt.
Sewid is still promoting a British Columbia seal hunt and soliciting donations toward the cost of shooting seals.
"U.S. residents, remember your fish swim through British Columbia waters," Sewid posts now and then. "Your donations help protect U.S. salmon and steelhead one bullet at a time."
Thomas Sewid. president and founder of Pacific Balance Marine Management. (Beth Clifton collage)
Pushing Sasquatch hunt is better business
Sewid, however, seems to be putting much more time and attention into the Sasquatch promotion industry lately, after promoting seal-shooting proved to be much less lucrative than he apparently imagined it might be.
Sewid spoke on January 21, 2023 at the "official" Buckley Sasquatch conference, hosted at the Lost Woods Brewery in Buckley, Washington.
Sewid is scheduled to speak in May 2023 at "Sasquatch Days" in Forks, Washington, a community best known as the setting for the vampire stories by Stephenie Meyer that inspired the 2008 film Twilight.
In September, Sewid claims, he is to be a speaker aboard "the first ever Alaska Bigfoot Cruise," aboard the Royal Caribbean Quantum of the Seas.
Encouraging people to hunt Bigfoot, mostly with cameras, might distract Sewid from encouraging people to shoot seals, for a while, anyhow.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Sasquatch showed up with the Great Depression
But of note is that the whole "Sasquatch" phenomenon appears to have originated as a joke on credulous big city reporters, approximately one year after the debut of the 1933 film classic King Kong.
The Wikipedia entry for Harrison Mills, British Columbia, asserts that "The dialect spoken by the Sts'Ailes," a local First Nations people, "includes the word sesqac, which is the source of the English word 'Sasquatch.' The vicinity of Harrison Bay, Harrison Mills, and the lower Harrison River is reputed to have the greatest number and density of Sasquatch sightings worldwide. The sasquatch is the emblem of the Chehalis First Nation and is sacred in Sts'Ailes culture."
NewspaperArchive.com, however, documents an entirely different story.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Miners, millers, railroaders, & sailors
From the first printed mention of "Sasquatch," in 1863, until 1934, and most often for the next several decades thereafter, the word was used entirely as a place name, identified as the original name of the province of Saskatchewan, cited as short for Saskatchewan, and also identified with various British Columbia locations, but not as either a living being, a supernatural entity, or any sort of belief.
The Harrison Bay, Harrison Mills, and lower Harrison River, meanwhile, began to be industrially developed as early as the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush of 1858, when 30,000 prospectors converged on the region. The first of the sawmills for which the community was named opened in 1892, closely followed by the arrival of a railway and a steamboat landing.
No one mentioned anything about any large, hairy, smelly creatures in the vicinity other than bears, miners, millers, railroaders and sailors.
(Beth Clifton collage)
"Nearly nude"
Tens of thousands of prospectors passed through from 1896 through 1904 during the overlapping Klondike, Yukon, and Alaska gold rushes.
Still no one reported seeing any large, hairy, smelly creatures other than the usual.
The first mention on record of Sasquatch was a wire service report distributed on March 2, 1934, alleging that a "wild man, described as huge, hairy, and nearly nude," seen around Harrison Mills "three times in as many months," had frightened a man identified as either Frank Dean or Frank Dan.
The "wild man" was said to have "advanced on him, growling."
(Beth Clifton collage)
Hungry bear
Added the account, "Tracks in the snow the next day showed the wild man had prowled around the cabin and later gone into the bush."
All of this would be typical bear behavior.
"A hunter also said he saw the wild man and was so frightened that he dropped his bag of game as he fled before the giant's attack," the article added.
That would also be indicative of bear behavior, especially in the depths of winter, when a bear awakened out of hibernation would be hungry.
(Beth Clifton collage)
"Clubs & stones"
Finally, the article said, "Indians of the Chelais reserve, asked about the creature, said that many years ago a whole tribe of the wild men lived in the region. They were called 'Sasquatch,' or 'hairy mountain men.' They lived in caves and hunted with clubs and stones."
Literally overnight the story picked up embellishments, many of them likely inspired by King Kong, which had just been shown in local theatres.
The next day's version of Frank Dean or Dan's story, headlined "Terrible Sasquatch abroad in the land," alleged that Sasquatch might emerge to "snatch an Indian into the unknown and to devour babies."
Said the second article, "For hundreds of years the Sasquatch has been a fearsome bogeyman to the northwest Indians," but "None had been reported for 30 years."
(Beth Clifton collage)
None shot, seen, nor even mentioned
Thirty years prior to 1934 would have been 1904, the end of the 12-year peak of prospecting, mining, milling, railroading, and steamboating activity in and around Harrison Mills, during which time no such creature was ever shot, seen, nor even mentioned.
Also of note, Harrison Mills is only ten miles from Abbotsford, the largest city in British Columbia outside of the Vancouver metropolitan area, and is just a 90-minute drive from Vancouver.
In other words, Harrison Mills was not exactly out in the boondocks even in 1904, and certainly not now.
(Beth Clifton collage)
"Happy hunting ground for weird legends"
By April 1934 the Sasquatch reports had attracted brothers and University of California medical students J.F. and C.K. Blakeney to conduct what appears to have been the first serious scientific effort to document the existence of Sasquatch.
Of course they found nothing.
By then, however, local journalists seem to have suspected that the First Nations people were having a joke at their expense––not for the first time.
(Beth Clifton photo)
Sasquatch mistaken for hummingbird
Concluded Associated Press, beneath the headline "Americans hunt baby-snatching bogeyman," "British Columbia is a happy hunting ground for weird legends and there is no lack of witnesses who will swear to them, and hundreds have sworn they have seen Ogopogo, the sheep-headed freshwater serpent of Lake Okanogan, and the two big saltwater sea-serpents, Hiaschuckalnick Oladborfosaurus and his 'wife' Amy."
As of June 1934, Sasquatch was said to have been nine feet tall when seen by one Mrs. James Caufield, who claimed she initially mistook the sound he made for the approach of a hummingbird.
Oklahoma state legislator Justin Humphrey. (Beth Clifton collage)
Thomas Sewid, meet Justin Humphrey
After that, Sasquatch the monster dropped out of the news for 30 years, until "Bigfoot" hoaxes in the U.S. inspired British Columbia tourism promoters to dust off the old Sasquatch stories and use them to stimulate visitor traffic and souvenir sales.
Either in pushing for a British Columbia seal hunt or in pushing the Sasquatch fiction, Thomas Sewid appears to have much in common with Oklahoma state legislator Justin J.J. Humphrey.
Merritt & Beth Clifton.
Humphrey is currently trying to erase the Oklahoma felony penalty for cockfighting, a practice punished as a felony both at the U.S. federal level, in all federal territories, and in 48 of the 50 U.S. states.
Humphrey on January 22, 2021 filed Oklahoma House Bill 1648, a failed attempt to establish a "Bigfoot" hunting season.
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