Seal hunters descend on ice floes
Thousands of sealers armed with clubs, rifles and spears have descended on the ice floes off eastern Canada for the world’s largest seal hunt.
The cull is expected to bring poor coastal communities some €13m in much-needed revenue but has been condemned by animal rights activists as barbaric.
The contentious harp seal hunt, the target of protests since the 1960s, begins about two weeks after the seal pups are born and their fur changes from white to grey.
Animal rights activists say the pups are clubbed to death and often skinned alive, but sealers and government officials who monitor the hunt insist the pups die instantly, under strict guidelines.
“It’s just horrific out there. There is blood all across the ice and seal carcasses as far as the eye can see,” Rebecca Aldworth of the Humane Society of the United States said from the Gulf of St Lawrence.
“We’ve seen seals that were moving around and breathing, that have been left in these piles, some left conscious and crawling,” said Aldworth, a native Newfoundlander who has observed the seal hunt for the past six years.
Regulations require that hunters ensure their prey is dead before moving on.
Many countries ban imports of seal products.
But the Canadian government says the hunt brings in badly-needed income to its coastal communities, primarily from pelt sales to Norway, Denmark and China.
Aboriginal and Inuit subsistence and commercial hunters begin the kill on November 15 in Canada's vast expanse of frozen northern waters, which reach from the Yukon Territories near Alaska through the Arctic Ocean and down into the North Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Labrador.
The spring leg of the commercial hunt starts in the Gulf of St Lawrence and moves to the Front, an arc of the Atlantic Ocean sweeping out about 30 to 40 miles from Newfoundland.
Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans says the country’s seal population is “healthy and abundant” and notes that there are an estimated five million harp seals, nearly the highest level ever recorded and almost triple what it was in the 1970s.
Local fishermen’s leader Ed Frenette said harp seal pelts were at an all-time high of €46 and that opponents of the hunt ought to target buyers, not the fishermen who desperately need the income from the pelts.
Aldworth said there were some 70 fishing boats in the area where she was filming the cull, about 20 miles south of the Magdalen Islands in the Gulf of St Lawrence.
She is posting her footage on the website www.protectseals.org.
She claimed there were no government officials on the ground to check whether the seals were being properly killed.
But Michel Therien, a spokesman for the Department of Fisheries and Oceans in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, denied this.
A report by the International Fund for Animal Welfare, meanwhile, says the harvest of up to 975,000 seals will damage the marine mammal population.
“Any pretence of a scientifically-based … hunt has been abandoned and Canada’s commercial seal hunt has become – quite simply – a cull, designed more to achieve short-term political objectives than those of a biologically sustainable hunt,” the report said.
