PETA Hits the Bars in New Seal Blitz: 'Anything But a Canadian Club'

Quirky Postcards in Toronto Bars Are Latest Campaign Tool

For Immediate Release:
March 18, 2011

Contact:
Ashley Gonzalez 202-483-7382        

Toronto -- PETA has teamed up with celebrated New Yorker cartoonist Harry Bliss for a new ad targeting Canada's controversial seal slaughter, which begins this month. The ad—which appears on 10,000 postcards that were distributed this week to Toronto hotspots—shows a seal sidling up to a bar and instructing the bartender, "Anything but a Canadian Club." Following a few years of online campaigning (which resulted in the Canadian government hiring someone to monitor PETA's social media activities), PETA now aims to reach a broad cross section of people in actual social hotspots. 

"With this bar blitz, we're reaching people where they least expect it," says PETA Senior Vice President Dan Mathews. "We want the happy-hour crowd to be just as outraged as the online community over the wasteful government spending on the cruel seal industry."

Later this spring, PETA will be bringing the ad campaign to bars and clubs nationwide with postcards and posters placed above urinals.

The reverse side of the postcards explain that every year, the Canadian government allows sealers to beat and skin 300,000 baby seals—even though the number actually killed is dwindling because a lack of demand has caused the price of seal fur to plummet. Since last year's slaughter, the European Union has joined the U.S. in banning seal products, and Chinese animal protection groups have protested Gail Shea's unsuccessful plan to market seal fur and meat in China. World leaders—including Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin, and His Holiness the Dalai Lama—have spoken out against the massacre, yet Harper's government still spends $7 million each year to prop up this dying event.

For more information, please visit PETA.org.