The HSUS's Director of Canadian Wildlife Issues has long been an observer of the Canadian seal hunt. Growing up in a sealing community in Newfoundland, Rebecca Aldworth was always aware of the hunt, but it wasn't until she saw television footage of the carnage that she realized what it was. Later, she would confront that brutality firsthand when she traveled to the ice floes of Northeastern Canada, video camera in hand, to record the abuses committed by sealers. In 2005, she'll make her seventh trip to the ice, taking with her other experts, videographers, and journalists.

Aldworth's job is to document Canada's commercial massacre of seals and to disseminate these harsh facts to the people and policymakers who have the power to halt the hunt forever. Through journal entries filed over the course of this year's seal hunt, she'll record her observations and share her views—from the days before the hunt, when the ice is covered with nursing seal pups; to the bloody first day of the hunt, when the ice is transformed from a seal nursery to a slaughterhouse; to the hunt's heartbreaking aftermath, when the ice is piled with pitifully small bodies stripped of their fur and left to rot.