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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS

MONTH: May 2007

Mother Nature fights the seal hunt

 

ST. JOHNS, Newfoundland-- Climatic conditions appeared likely to do the annual Atlantic Canadian seal hunt more economic damage in 2007 than all the protests and boycotts worldwide combined.

As ANIMAL PEOPLE went to press on April 25, sealers were still assessing the combined cost of a sealing season that was almost without ice in much of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, while drifting sheet ice trapped and badly damaged sealing vessels along the Labrador Front, northeast of Newfoundland. A dozen crews had abandoned their boats after ice cracked the hulls.

"Two Canadian Coast Guard icebreakers, the Ann Harvey and the Sir Wilfred Grenfell, are trapped in the ice along with the sealing vessels. Helicopters are flying food and fuel to the stranded crews on the ice," reported Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.

As many as 90 sealing boats were trapped in ice, as of April 23, up from 60 ten days earlier, according to the St. Johns Telegram. The icebreakers had managed to free only about 10 boats in five days of effort, before becoming stuck themelves.

"An onshore wind is compacting the ice," explained Fisheries Canada spokesperson Phil Jenkins. "The boats were on their way back from sealing and then got stuck."

Earlier, on April 13, the 65-foot L.J. Kennedy burned at dockside in Port au Choix, Newfoundland, after taking aboard a full load of fuel and ammunition in preparation to hunt seals along the Labrador Front.

The seal hunt usually occurs in two phases, opening in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, which is relatively accessible to protesters, shifting to the Labrador Front after the Gulf of St. Lawrence quota is filled.
This year, lack of ice for birthing and nursing meant that tens of thousands of infant seals drowned.
"I've witnessed the hunt for nine years, and I've never seen ice conditions this bad," said Humane Society of the U.S. anti-sealing campaign director Rebecca Aldworth.

Agreed Associated Press writer Rob Gillies, "In the southern Gulf of St. Lawrence, the worst ice conditions in more than two decades have nearly wiped out the herd."

Fisheries Canada cut the 2007 sealing quota from 335,000 to 270,000, in recognition that the Gulf of St. Lawrence population might be jeopardized, but insisted that there are still about 5.5 million harp seals in Atlantic Canadian waters, down just 300,000 from the official peak reached in 2004.

The sealing quotas in recent years have been among the highest ever. In 1900, by contrast, Atlantic Canadian sealers killed only 100,000 harp seals.

Canadian Department of Fisheries & Oceans researcher Mike Hammill told the Toronto Globe & Mail that much of the Gulf of St. Lawrence also failed to freeze in 1969 and 1981, without lastingly reducing the seal population.

"We have been anticipating this in our modeling," Hammill claimed. "We have been putting into our model the assumption that we're losing 100,000 extra pups due to poor ice conditions. I think the numbers will be higher," he allowed, "but I'm not sure how much higher. It's not an ecological disaster," Hammill insisted.

However, Fisheries Canada moved the next scheduled comprehensive seal census forward a year, to 2008, to better assess the impact of the lack of ice.

About forty boats were eligible to hunt seals in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, from ports in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island, but Canadian Press reported that only two boats ventured out on opening day.

International Fund for Animal Welfare observer Sheryl Fink told Canadian Press that she could find only one boat from the air.

Fisheries Canada spokesperson Jenkins said just 860 seals were killed during the first three days of the 2007 hunt.

The 2007 on-the-ice observation and protest phase was among the quietest in years. Barred from entering Newfoundland or otherwise approaching the sea massacre, Sea Shepherd Conservation Society founder Paul Watson could only observe through electronic media. IFAW activity, after the first few days, appeared to consist entirely of "virtual press conferences" conducted from the IFAW headquarters in Cape Cod.

Aldworth, a Newfoundland native, observed the hunt for two weeks, mostly from the air. She left on April 14.

Aldworth and Fink of IFAW were denied observer permits for the first two days of the commercial Gulf hunt.

"To us, that says there's something the Canadian government didn't want the public to see," Aldworth told Andrew Buncombe of The Independent. "In this case, I believe it was the image of just a few seal pups clinging to tiny pans of ice and seal hunters still coming with clubs and guns and shooting and killing every last pup they could find."

Fisheries Canada spokesperson Jenkins told Canadian Press that observer permits were not issued because so few seals, hunters, and boats were involved this year, implying that the government felt it was necessary to keep the few protesters on the scene from creating a traffic jam.

"The ice floes are now empty, and the only signs of the pups who were once here are the blood trails left across the ice," Aldworth wrote on April 13, in her last of a series of web postings from the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

"We would typically also see thousands of carcasses discarded on the ice," Aldworth said. "This year, sealers have kept the dead seals aboard their boats, not throwing the carcasses into the ocean until our cameras are out of view. The sight of hundreds of seals, some still moving, stockpiled on each sealing vessel's deck, awash in blood, is one of the most disturbing images I have seen."

Earlier, Aldworth and other personnel were mobbed at their helicopter refueling site. "About 20 carloads of people surrounded us," Aldworth wrote. "They shouted at us and banged on our truck, telling us to stop filming the hunt. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police surrounded our team, but said they could not remove the crowd." The mob left only after puncturing the truck's radiator.

Accompanying Aldworth for several days of observation was Daily Mail animal welfare writer Danny Penman, whose vivid account of "unimaginable sadism and cruelty" appeared on April 6.

But there has never been any lack of testimony as to the brutality of seal-clubbing. Jack London in The Sea Wolf (1904) made the sadistic sealing captain Wolf Larson his most memorable villain.

The March 1933 edition of The National Humane Review, published by the American Humane Association, recalled that sealing in both Atlantic and northern Pacific waters brought intensive humane protest before 1911, as "No cruelty was too horrible for the seal hunters."

The pioneering ichthyologist David Starr Jordan (1851-1931), for whom the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration research ship David Starr Jordan was named, was an early and outspoken opponent of seal-clubbing.

Another noteworthy early critic of seal-clubbing was Sir George Baden-Powell, who helped instill in his younger brother Robert the love of nature that inspired him to found the Boy Scouts.

The first wave of protest against sealing ended after then-President Theodore Roosevelt in 1911 endorsed into law a set of fur seal conservation measures that eventually were combined with whale and dolphin protection legislation to become the Marine Mammal Protection Act. But contrary to widespread impression, encouraged by the sealing industry, the 1911 law did nothing to make sealing less inhumane.

Protest was revived after an exposé of the Atlantic Canada seal hunt appeared in the July 1929 edition of The National Geographic. Further exposés subsequently appeared in at least five leading British magazines, along with a 1932 pamphlet called The Cruelties of Seal Hunting, by Sydney H. Beard, of London.

Protest reignited repeatedly--after Harry Lillie obtained the first film of the Atlantic Canada seal hunt in 1955, after New Brunswick SPCA inspector Brian Davies started the "Save The Seals Fund" in 1960; after Davies transformed the "Save The Seals Fund" into IFAW in 1968; after Greenpeace activists led by Paul Watson confronted sealers on the ice in the early 1970s; and, when Greenpeace backed away from anti-sealing and anti-fur campaigns, after Watson formed the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society in 1977.

A boycott of Atlantic Canadian cod brought a 10-year suspension of the offshore seal hunt, beginning in 1984, but when overfishing caused the cod stock to collapse--as Watson among others had predicted--blaming seals for the collapse proved politically convenient, and the seal hunt resumed. Sealing opponents have been looking ever since for something else to boycott effectively, a difficult task because Newfoundland exports so little.

Boycotting Canada as a whole would be counterproductive because public opinion is already opposed to the seal hunt in the provinces that export the most. Canadian political support for the seal hunt reflects the unique position of Atlantic Canada as the perennial sources of "swing votes" in competition for dominance among three major parties.

HSUS has for several years promoted a boycott of Canadian seafood, now boosted in Europe by British organization Respect for Animals, and endorsed by hundreds of smaller activist groups.

"British supermarkets have already begun reviewing their fish buying policies," wrote Penman of the Daily Mail. "Canadian authorities are clearly rattled by the possibility of a consumer backlash.

International outrage against this year's slaughter has reached unprecedented levels. Belgium has banned the import of all seal products. France, Germany and Italy are all considering following suit. The European Union is coming under increasing pressure to extend its ban on seal pelts, and the European Parliament has voted for a complete ban. The present ban," explained Penman, "only applies to seals less than twelve days old. This allows fishermen to profit from battering to death seals just a few days older. The U.K. government says it supports a European ban, and will continue pushing for it."

The major seal pelt markets, however, are in Russia and China.