From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2008:
Addenda to Swinging Canadian elections keeps the sealers swinging clubs:
Animal Alliance of Canada pursues electoral strategy

Commentary by Merritt Clifton
Long before University of Texas at El Paso philosophy
department chair Steven Best became a popular speaker at animal
rights conferences, noted for fiery defenses of “direct action”
vandalism, film maker Stephen Best of Shelburne, Ontario became
quietly known to animal advocacy insiders–and the political
opposition–as one of the most astute strategists in the cause. When
defenders of the seal hunt produced strategy papers, obtained
eventually by news media, Best was repeatedly identified as one of
the voices most essential to isolate and neutralize, even though few
grassroots activists had ever heard his name.
Grassroots activists knew his work. Best’s 1973 documentary
Seal Song, commissioned by the International Fund for Animal
Welfare, “became part of the long-running British television series
Survival,” he remembers. More than that, Seal Song put the annual
Atlantic Canada seal hunt into living rooms worldwide. Eighteen
years earlier, film maker Harry Lillie brought back the first film
of the seal hunt, inspiring an informed few to revive anti-sealing
campaigns that had previously been waged in the early 1900s, late
1920s, and late 1930s, but it was Seal Song that turned the cause
into a cultural phenomenon.

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