We are celebrating our latest achievement: on 10 July, we rescued our 300th seal for 2020! It is a huge milestone and a sad record at the same time. Our main culprits for 2020 so far were fishing line and packaging straps, but we have also seen an increase in fishing hooks and other unidentified plastic and rubber objects. The year is far from over, and we will continue to do our work until there are no more entangled seals to be found.We just posted our latest rescue - if you have not seen it on Youtube, here is the link:

https://youtu.be/3jpsnw7uuzA

We keep record of all entanglements, at the end of the year we will publish our data on gender and age of the rescued seals as well as type, severity and location of the entanglement. Our data will be processed by researchers from a university in France. We are also hoping to get a research permit through the Namibian Dolphin Project to tag rescued animals. We often encounter old rescues, but with 300 seals in 2020 alone, we could use some help to connect the rescue to the original entanglement. We have a million questions about rescues we would like to find the answer for: do they all make it? How long does the healing process take? Do they come back to Pelican Point or avoid us forever? Do some seals get entangled more than once?

Namibia has been heavily impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic. Namibia could keep the number of positive cases very low for a long time as a result of a very strict lockdown, but the virus has unfortunately arrived. Walvis Bay, maybe because it is a harbour town, has recorded by far the most cases, but we are only at the beginning of the outbreak. The economy is suffering. Many people have lost their jobs. A country like Namibia has almost no social security in place, and many Namibians are starving. Conservation is a luxury they cannot afford. It is hard to ask people to care about the environment and seals, when nobody seems to care about them.  

We are not a welfare organisation. But it is impossible to look away when you see hungry children on a daily basis. Our team from OCN decided to join a local soup kitchen a few weeks ago and we are happy we can help to feed up to 800 children every Wednesday. We are still an environmental NGO: all children bring their own containers and cutlery, no single use plastics are given out :-)

If you want to make a contribution towards our feeding program, please use our fundraiser platform www.gogetfunding.com/seal/ and specify in the comments that you would like the donation to be used for the soup kitchen. 

THANK YOU for your ongoing support!

Naude & Katja