Book excerpt: Seal Wars: Twenty-Five Years on the Front Lines is the bold and sprawling memoir of Canadian rebel Paul Watson. To some a hero, to others a 'fokking seal-loving piece of merde,' Sea Shepherd Captain Paul Watson recounts his 25 years on the front lines in the war to stop the slaughter of the Canadian harp seal. The memoir begins with an incident in 1995 when Watson was holed up in a hotel in the Magdalen Islands with actor Martin Sheen. An angry mob of sealers stormed the hotel and Watson had to be taken out by police and airlifted to safety. Watson then remembers the childhood experiences that shaped his adult consciousness. He runs through a history of the seal hunt, and moves into the campaigns he has fought in, starting in 1976 with a Greenpeace crew off Laborador, including forays onto the ice floes with Brigitte Bardot, Farley Mowat and Pierce Brosnan. Captain Paul Watson grew up on Canada's east coast. He was a founding member of Greenpeace, is an active supporter of North American native peoples and a veteran of Wounded Knee. He is the founder and president of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. And he has been the captain of a succession of ships dedicated to the protection of the world oceans, most recently Whales Forever.