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A fur trade campaigner from Nottingham has said he would rather go to jail than pay a fine after being accused of breaching an exclusion zone to film a seal cull in Canada.
Mark Glover, of the Respect for Animals Group, flew to Canada this morning to stand trial for allegedly straying within 10m (33ft) of the legal seal cull.
It is a charge, he says, which is politically motivated and designed to hide the "horrendous" truth about the killing of seals on the east coast of Canada.
If convicted he faces a fine of 100,000 Canadian dollars (GBP50,000),
which he says he will not pay.
Mr Glover, from Carlton, said: "The Canadians were getting fed up with the level of cruelty we were filming.
"The word went out and we were all arrested. The regulations are very straightforward - you cannot go within 10 metres of sealers killing seals."
The group, said Mr Glover, were filming from boats off the coast of the Magdalen Islands and claim to have "forensic proof" from film footage they recorded that they were never within 10 metres of the cull.
"We were getting really a lot of horrendous film when the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and fisheries department officers, who had hidden themselves in a fishing boat, stopped us.
"I would say it is politically motivated; this and changing the law to stop us going out there.
"The real purpose, I guess, is that they don't like observation of the hunt and they are looking to ban anyone from observing the hunt, if they are convicted of this, for five years."
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