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Farley Mowat hasn't wandered far from his home in Port Hope, Ont. in recent weeks, but his name has been making headlines around the world.

An anti-sealing ship named in Mr. Mowat's honour has been at the centre of controversy over its tactics to stop sealers in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The vessel, owned by the militant Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, was boarded by the RCMP and Coast Guard on Saturday and the ship's captain and first officer were arrested.

Upon hearing of the arrests, the legendary Canadian writer put up the $10,000 needed to bail the crew members out.

Mr. Mowat, 86, is the society's international chair and has been involved with anti-sealing movement since 1975.

At the time, he felt sympathy for the sealers but said that after three days, he came to see the hunt as a brutal slaughter.

Since then, Mr. Mowat has been an outspoken opponent of the Canadian government's support for the seal hunt.

Mr. Mowat has been writing since 1949, and with sales of his books at over 14 million copies in 25 countries (his work has been translated into 52 languages), he is one of Canada's most successful writers.

In 1984, Mr. Mowat published Sea of Slaughter, an impassioned indictment of environmental destruction in the North Atlantic.

He said there are only three honours that have had any meaning in his life. The first was his induction into the Order of Canada and the second was when he was barred from the United States in the mid-1980s over his activism. But he said the most significant was the re-naming of the Sea Shepherd flagship in his honour in 2002.

There seems to be no in-between when it comes to opinions about the seal hunt. Mr. Mowat joined us Thursday for a discussion on the subject. Read his responses to readers' questions below.

Jennifer MacMillan, globeandmail.com: Hello Mr. Mowat and thank you for joining us. Many people have already submitted questions today, so let's get right to it.

Jody Greening from Burlington, Canada: Mr. Mowat, as a Canadian who has helped enrich the cultural heritage of Canada through your various works, how can you be so against something that many say is part of the Newfoundland cultural heritage? You should know full well that these men are far from the barbarians that they are made out to be. The hunt is one of the most closely monitored events that take place with respect to the killing of wild game. You are a very well-respected author in Newfoundland, by the way.

Farley Mowat: I don't consider it part of the cultural heritage of Canada. This is a claim made by the supporters of the seal slaughter. It is certainly part of the cultural heritage of the Arctic aboriginals, the Inuit. But that is a different story.

It has nothing to do whatsoever with the massacre at the Gulf of St. Lawrence and at The Front.

Even supposing that there was some ancient cultural merit in it for us southerners, then it is obviously outdated, just as bull fighting is considered outdated now in Europe.

Jamie Laidlaw from Ottawa, Ontario: I am ashamed of my government acting without provocation or decency in their pursuit of stigmatizing the Sea Shepherd society. I am enormously proud of your principled and decent response to this shameful behaviour. Thanks for bailing our guests out! Can you tell me what you hope we can achieve in the long run? And what can we reasonably hope for in the short term? What is a viable way to do keep the discussion open?

Farley Mowat: In the long run I hope we'll achieve a more humane attitude to the other animals who share this planet with us. And if we don't achieve that there's very little likelihood of our own survival.

What's going to happen in the short term is that the European Union will put a total embargo on the importation of seal products into Europe. This will effectively halt the slaughter because there will be no money to be made from it.

The behaviour of the Canadian government in this incident, which I consider totalitarian behaviour suitable to a dictatorship, is already having enormous repercussions outside this country.

Within Canada the media has given very limited reaction to what I consider an absolute crime committed by the Canadian government. It's an act of piracy as Paul Watson calls it: Seizing a neutral ship with a Dutch registry and a Dutch skipper in international waters and ramming the ship with an ice breaker twice the size of the Farley Mowat and then boarding her with two boatloads of thugs armed with machine guns.

We should stop listening to what the government propagandists have been feeding us for the past 50 years and look at what is in a nutshell is the most deplorable slaughter of non-human animals taking place on our planet.

Doug Dewan from Calgary, Alberta: Mr. Mowat, are you against the hunt entirely or the means by which it is done? I see no reason why sealers should not be able to make a livelihood as long as they are managing the population of seals and the hunt is done humanely.

If we are to stop one group of people from hunting, then we should stop all hunting. People hunt elk, deer, etc. every year and no one seems to be upset about that. Can you explain your position on hunting more clearly please?

Farley Mowat: My personal opinion is that hunting for subsistence and for necessity is and always has been valid. Hunting for pleasure or profit is not valid. I think we should turn our backs upon that ancient attitude.

The seal slaughter is a minimal contribution to seal hunters' income, probably the least important single aspect of income of Newfoundlanders of whom less than four per cent actively engage in the seal hunt. That's the most recent figure I've seen. It costs the Canadian taxpayers at least three times of money the seal slaughter earns for Newfoundlanders every year.

Craig Scott from Newfoundland, Canada: I am a Newfoundlander and am deeply offended by the lies that many protesters tell to bolster their arguments against the seal hunt.

Protesters continue to use the image of the white coat seals in their literature and refer to "baby" seals as if they were human, even though it has been illegal to kill that type of seal since the 1980s.

Protesters intentionally mislead people to believe this is still happening. Also (and this is the part that bothers me the most) Mr. Watson and the Sea Shepherd Society have collected huge amounts of money in the name of these seals but they don't do one single thing to help seals.

They don't need help because they are not endangered, although there are endangered species of seals out there that the society has no interest in. Isn't this whole campaign about raising money for the Sea Shepherd Society?

Farley Mowat: The whole campaign that has been waged by the government and the pro-sealing lobby is about making money for the sealers. It's about money. The Sea Shepherd Society and other groups like it require a certain amount of money to operate, and this comes from freely given donations and it is almost entirely spent on the defence of the seals. It is not used for private purposes. There's no comparison between slaughtering seals to raise money for personal purposes and raising money for the protection of other living creatures.

Graham Thomas from Canada: Mr. Mowat, thank you for joining this discussion on what is truly a high-profile Canadian issue. While I abhor senseless killing and am revolted by photos of seals being bludgeoned to death, I confess I feel the same when seeing slaughterhouses on TV.

One presumes that most of the country has reached this state of acceptance on the meat issue. Why is it wrong to murder seals when killing cattle of all ages is acceptable?

Mr. Mowat: We don't kill seals to eat them, at least we southerners don't. Only the Inuit do and that is legitimate. The killing of any living thing for subsistence reasons is abhorrent in many ways but it is part of the biological structure of life.

Some animals eat plants and some animals eat those animals. We wouldn't be here if we hadn't done that for generations. Killing animals en masse simply to make a profit is totally abhorrent. I will fight it to my last breath. If we take what we need to survive, to subsist, then we're in balance. If we start taking more than we need, for desire, for selfish purposes, then we're out of balance. We're committing a crime against life.

When Europeans first arrived on this coast, which is documented in my book Sea of Slaughter, roughly three centuries ago cod fish were so abundant. There's the famous story about Jacques Cartier lowering the baskets over the side of his boat and the oceans were swarming with life. Biologists estimate there must have been 30 and 50 million harp seals. There were God knows how many cod fish.

Humans have succeeded in reducing all larger forms of life in the ocean to their current state, including seals. The official seal killers claim there's five and a half million seals now. That's a gross exaggeration. Biologists who are not paid by the federal or Newfoundland government say that's it about half that many. Nature will look after balancing life in the ocean if we would stay the hell out of it. I'm really fed up to the teeth with human beings blaming other animals for the destructive propensity of our own species.

Lori R. from Kitchener, Ontario: I appreciate your willingness to come to this public forum to address this issue. Firstly, I find the actions of the Sea Shepherd group (including proudly counting sunk ships on their own hulls/websites) quite startling. How much aggression in the name of humane treatment do you feel is justified?

Farley Mowat: There's never been any aggressive action by any of the Sea Shepherd people. In the 28 years they have never injured or killed any human being. Very few of their opposition can make the same claim, including the Canadian Coast Guard. Granted, it was an accident, but four men were killed.

That sort of attitude infuriates me. If anybody else so much as raises a hand, they're criminals, or as the premier of Newfoundland has recently called them, "terrorists." To call Paul Watson a "terrorist" is the same as calling him a murderer, and it's criminal libel.

Tony Seaward from Bonavista, Newfoundland: Mr. Mowat, on the Sea Shepherd website, Paul Watson has called the seal hunt "a glorified welfare scheme using tax-dollars to appease a very small minority of fishermen in Newfoundland" and called sealers "welfare bums" and "barbarous thugs." As the international chair of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, do you share Paul Watson's views about sealers?

Farley Mowat: I think that what Paul Watson said, when he's driven to it and exasperated beyond measure, is sweet talk compared to the kind of language used by the federal minister of fisheries and the premier of Newfoundland used to describe Watson and myself.

We have no apologies to make. It's for the other side to apologize for the language they have used to describe us. It's particularly Watson, I'm not really a target.

Joan Forsey from Toronto Canada writes: Why don't you believe the Royal Commission on Seals and Sealing; the five representatives of the Canadian Veterinary Medical Association (including the chair of its animal welfare committee and two past committee members); the late Dr. H.C. Rowsell, DVM, who taught on the faculty of medicine, University of Ottawa, and was founder of the Canadian Council on Animal Care and served as its first executive director; the Independent Veterinarians' Working Group on the Canadian Harp Seal Hunt (with members from five countries). All of them, and many others, have said the seal hunt is conducted in an acceptably humane manner.

Farley Mowat: Over 80-some odd years I've developed a certain suspicion of experts. When I hear an expert speak, I wonder who is behind him. Is he or she a member of the establishment? You must always examine the speaker when you hear an expert and find out whether he has a concealed motive and in many, many cases they do. Statistics are made to lie. They're designed to confuse and mislead us. They need to be very carefully examined before they're accepted.

Individuals will set themselves up as experts on the seal hunt and declare it humane and decent, but they are outweighed by people just as well-qualified who say the reverse. But you don't hear from them.

I know personally at least six Department of Fisheries scientists who are no longer with the department who condemn the department for lying. It's one of the reasons we have no cod fish. Never trust an expert until he or she proves that he is an honest person.

Joan Forsey from Toronto, Canada writes: You say only the Inuit kill seals to eat them. Seal flippers are considered a delicacy in Newfoundland. In Newfoundland cookbooks there are many recipes for flippers and seal meat. Did you not hear of that when you lived on the south coast of Newfoundland many years ago?

Farley Mowat: Seal flippers are very nearly the closest thing to a culinary atrocity I have ever tasted, and I have tasted them. Almost the entire body of every seal killed in Newfoundland is discarded or left on the ice. It's thrown overboard and wasted. It's not part of subsistence in Newfoundland. To say it justifies the seal hunt is insanity.

The assumption is made that all Newfoundlanders support the seal hunt and very few do. At no time was more than a quarter of the active male population involved in the seal hunt even at its peak when they were killing 10 million seals a year. Most Newfoundlanders were never involved in it. I lived there for six years and I'm still in touch with many Newfoundlanders who abhor the seal slaughter and they're fed up with it. It's an illusion that this a grave cultural core of Newfoundlanders. It's propaganda, that's what it is.

Tony Seaward from Canada: Mr. Mowat, don't you consider the sinking of ten ships by the Sea Shepherd Society aggressive?

Farley Mowat: These were pirate whalers that were all sunk while in harbour or at dock. No one was injured and no harm was done. That's unlike government actions against these environmental ships like the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior, the flagship of Greenpeace, by the French government in New Zealand. It was at dock at a port in New Zealand and the French government flew in a team of saboteurs and attached a mine and blew it up. They killed a photographer on board who was a member of the crew.

Jennifer MacMillan, globeandmail.com: I understand you are currently hard at work on your 40th book so we particularly appreciate that you have taken time out of your schedule for our discussion today. Throughout your career, you have used the written word to speak out on topics ranging from the Canadian government's treatment of the Inuit in the 1940s to today's seal hunt. Will your next book, Otherwise, also have a political slant?

Farley Mowat: It's a memoir of my middle years. It's a memoir of when I first became aware that human beings were part of the family of life as are all the other animals. We are not alone on the planet, but we are busily alienating ourselves from the others. This book is about my personal awakening to the others and what I've learned in the process. That's where the "wise" comes in. That book is due for publication this fall.

Jennifer MacMillan: Mr. Mowat, thanks very much for your time today. To wrap up, do you think the debate on sealing in Canada will be resolved in the near future?

Farley Mowat: This year is the first year that I've noticed that the media has made an attempt to be fair and to examine the situation rationally from both points of view.

Now the press is beginning to shake itself loose and to recognize they really need to find out what is going on. There's a groundswell in this country that this whole thing needs to be resolved and the seal slaughter needs to stop. I think it's coming. I'm an optimist about this and I didn't used to be.

The experiences in the past 10 days have been an indication that there's a basic revulsion about the seal slaughter that can't be re-directed by politicians any longer. It's more of a sensory perception than anything else. My senses tell me that there's a mood change in this country. I think people are going to make it clear they want the whole thing solved. And it's causing people a pretty bloody penny.

You'd be surprised how many sealers are anti-sealing. They like the money but they don't enjoy bashing in seal skulls. Only some do. I've been out on the ice many times. I was aboard a sealer for 10 days off the northeast of Newfoundland that was a hunt of adult seals. I was in it and they were shooting adult seals on the ice and they were recovering about one in five. Many of the seals they were hitting would slide off the ice. The slaughter was incredible.

The same thing applies to this day. When the government announces a quote of a quarter of a million seals, it will result in the death of half to three-quarters of a million seals. The ban of the hakapik is a diversion. The issue is we have no right to be slaughtering forms of life on a magnitude like this. There's no justification for it, except a commercial one.