ENVIRONMENT-CANADA: Annual Seal Hunt Begins

By Stephen Leahy Reprint | | Print |

Stephen Leahy* - Tierramérica

TORONTO, Mar 29 2006 (IPS) - Despite protests by animal rights activists, including former Beatle Paul McCartney and French film star Bridgette Bardot, the annual seal hunt has begun on the ice floes of the Gulf of St. Lawrence in eastern Canada.

The Canadian government increased the annual quota of harp seals (Phoca groenlandica) from 319,000 in 2005 to 325,000 this year. That’s too many seals, says Chris Cutter, an activist with the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW).

An unusually warm winter has left little ice in the Gulf, Cutter told Tierramérica after a helicopter overflight last week, before the hunting season began on Mar. 25. “We hardly saw any seals,” he said.

Named for the harp-shaped pattern on the backs of the adults, the seals mainly give birth to their pups on floating ice, where they are safe from land-based predators.

Young seal pups are able to float, but are poor swimmers and often drown in rough weather. The harp seal herd is about 5.8 million, with an estimated one million pups born each year, says Phil Jenkins, spokesman for Canada’s Federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO), which regulates the hunt.

The lack of ice was taken into account when setting this year’s quota, Jenkins told Tierramérica. “McCartney and the animal rights groups have got the wrong information about the hunt.”

It has been illegal to hunt white-coat pups since 1987. Seal pups lose their white coats about 12 days after birth and are three to eight weeks old when killed for their short, flat fur that can fetch 70 dollars a pelt.

But the debate about the sustainability of the hunt is nowhere near as contentious as the issue of animal cruelty.

Every year, hundreds of animal activists and journalists from Europe and the United States come to this cold and stormy part of Canada to protest and witness the bloody spectacle of thousands of young seals being shot or clubbed to death, and then skinned on the white ice.

Sometimes the animals are still alive while they are being skinned, says Cutter.

“The hunt isn’t pretty to look at, but killing animals never is,” says environmentalist Lori-Ann Martino, from the town of St. John in Newfoundland province. Most of the seal hunters are from Newfoundland, where sealing and fishing have been the main livelihood for hundreds of years.

“Most Newfoundlanders are animal lovers and 90 percent of the people here support the hunt,” Martino told Tierramérica.

Economically depressed, banned from fishing several depleted species in the North Atlantic, there are few options left for earning money, she says. “The 2,000 dollars a sealer makes might not sound like much, but it goes along way when you’re living on 700 dollars a month the rest of the year.”

The international opposition that demonises Newfoundlanders as club-wielding barbarians has strengthened their resolve to continue to hunt seals, says Martino.

The clubs with a spike on the end are called “hakapiks” and are used in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Guns are used by Newfoundlanders in their portion of the hunt.

Shooting seals on floating ice from boats bobbing in the waves means some animals are wounded and suffer, concluded a report by the Independent Veterinarians Working Group (IVWG) on the Canadian Harp Seal Hunt last year.

The IVWG said that “if harp seals are hunted, the process of killing [ought to] be done humanely, correctly and efficiently,” and made 11 recommendations. Among the group’s criticisms is that they consider the hunt a free-for-all that rewards those who collect the most skins.

Although the DFO has not yet implemented all 11 recommendations, it did establish regional quotas to reduce the competition between sealers, said Jenkins. “We also have more enforcement officials in place,” he added.

But Rebecca Aldworth, of the U.S. Humane Society, argues that “regional quotas won’t make any difference. The economics of sealing means they have to kill as fast as they can.”

The dangerous conditions of the hunt mean huge insurance costs for boats and individuals. Moreover, there are too many hunters looking for too few seals, Aldworth said in an interview.

“The DFO’s population numbers are just absurd and have been criticised by other scientists,” she said.

“This is a repeat of the DFO-managed northern cod stocks,” she said. The DFO kept the allowable catches for this fish species too high for political reasons, and now, ten years after a complete ban on fishing, the cod have not recovered. Many fishermen incorrectly blame the harp seals for that, said Aldworth.

(*Stephen Leahy is a Tierramérica contributor. Originally published Mar. 25 by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme and the United Nations Environment Programme.)