Stephen Leahy* - Tierramérica

BROOKLIN, Canada, Apr 12 2005 (IPS) — The controversial commercial seal hunt extended Tuesday onto the ice floes south of the Labrador Peninsula in Canada, as animal rights activists protest what they consider an unnecessarily cruel practice.

Nearly 100,000 baby seals have been clubbed and shot in the past few weeks in the Gulf of St. Lawrence in the first part of the annual commercial hunt that will harvest some 319,000 harp seals (Phoca groenlandica), named for the harp-shaped pattern on the backs of the adults.

On Apr. 12, the hunters moved out onto the desolate ice floes, some 100 km on the open sea, where they have not been since the 1980s due to factors of distance and danger.

“There is unimaginable cruelty, with wounded seals drowning in their own blood or being skinned alive,” says Rebecca Aldworth, of the U.S. Humane Society (USHS), which is calling for a boycott of all Canadian seafood to protest the killing.

“This is the largest slaughter of marine animals in the world. There is nothing else like it,” Aldworth, a witness of this year’s and six previous hunts, told Tierramérica.

The young seals targeted in the hunt have been weaned and are between 12 and 90 days old. They remain on the ice near where they are born until ready to begin hunting for their own food underwater.

The pups are hunted for their pelts, a short, flat waterproof fur.

The Canadian government considers the seal hunt a commercial exploitation of a relatively abundant natural resource, like fish. In 2002 it estimated there were about five million harp seals and set a three-year harvest target of roughly 950,000 animals.

A new three-year plan is to be released later this year and is expected to allow a similar numbers of seals to be harvested in the coming years.

“Our goal is simple: to maintain a healthy, strong, sustainable population for years to come,” Geoff Regan, Canada’s Minister of Fisheries and Oceans, said in a statement.

Scientists from around the world and representatives from the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) are expected to review the government’s data on seals and what constitutes a sustainable population.

Canadian fisheries officials are widely thought to have mismanaged fish stocks -the nearly extinct northern cod in particular – but their estimates of the seal populations seem to be correct, according to Ransom Myers, fisheries biologist at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Myers told Tierramérica in an e-mail interview that he believes this year’s hunt is sustainable and that the controversy is an animal rights issue, not a conservation issue.

Contrary to a widely held belief, the seal hunt has nothing to do with assisting the recovery of the northern cod stocks, he said. Although seals do eat young cod, it’s a very small part of their diet.

Graphic footage of the baby seals being clubbed to death on the white ice in the late 1970s led to the collapse of the seal fur markets. By that time seal populations had plummeted to less than two million.

While activists like Aldworth dispute the sustainability of the current hunt, they bitterly oppose what they see as the cruelty involved.

Large clubs with spike on the end called hakapiks are used to bash the seals on the head or they are shot with rifles from boats.

In 2002, the Canadian Veterinary Medical Association investigated the use of the hakapiks and determined when used properly they were effective killing tools and as humane as killing done in commercial slaughterhouses.

But USHS spokeswoman Aldworth says that proper use hakapiks is difficult on the shifting, slippery ice, and in bad weather.

“Shooting small seals from a boat is difficult, so many are just wounded and can lie for hours in agony before being killed,” she said.

IFAW, which has been tracking the seal hunt for three decades, says that few hunters bother to make sure the seal pups are dead before skinning them. Sometimes a single hunter will gather as many as eight wounded seals and skin them, one by one, amidst the indescribable sound of wails and screams.

”What has happened to mercy, to beauty, to the value of a beating heart?” is the IFAW slogan in its campaign to save the seals.

The Canadian government claims less than five percent of seals suffer needlessly, and that officials closely monitor the hunt and enforce regulations.

“This year I saw a several groups of sealers, about 800 people in all, working away, and not one enforcement official in sight,” said Aldworth.

More than 660 documented violations of the regulations have been submitted by activists and not one official charge has been laid, she said.

Although the European fashion industry is once again sporting fur in their new collections, the seal fur market remains relatively small at 16 million dollars a year.

Countries like Belgium, however, have banned sales of all seal products, and Britain, Italy and others are likely to follow suit.

The 4,000 sealers in Canada are mainly fishers from Newfoundland province. They can earn a few thousand dollars in the two to three weeks of the hunt before the fishing season opens.

In 2000, around 40 percent of Canadians said they agreed with conducting the annual seal harvest. In contrast, ”79 percent of Americans surveyed oppose the seal hunt and most are prepared to boycott Canadian seafood,” as the USHS is proposing, Aldworth said.

Canada exports some three billion dollars in fish products to the United States a year.

Prominent environmental activist Paul Watson, of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, announced that he will be observing the hunt this week from his ship, the Farley Mowat, even though he doesn’t have the proper permits from the Canadian government.

“Canada does not want us to see and document what happens up on those forlorn and lonely ice floes,” Watson said in an open letter.

(* Originally published Apr. 9 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.)