Great Seal Hunt Article

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Boston Globe

 

http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/081/nation/Viagra_helping_to_reduce_seal_hunti\

ng+.shtml

 

Viagra helping to reduce seal hunting

 

Canadian study shows drop in Asian market one of many

factors

 

By Colin Nickerson, Globe Staff, 3/22/2001

 

MONTREAL - The most famous pill from the labs of

Pfizer Inc. may do what Brigitte Bardot and a whole

generation of animal-rights activists have failed to

accomplish: save the seals.

 

Recent years have seen a dramatic drop in the number

of seals taken in the world's last major commercial

hunt of marine mammals. Some 91,000 seals were killed

on the ice floes off Newfoundland and Quebec last

year, sharply down from an annual harvest of 280,000

in the late 1990s, according to a new study of the

beleagured sealing industry.

 

One reason, the researchers suggest, is that when a

modern Chinese male fears his sexual powers are

flagging, he is increasingly likely to grab for a

bottle of Viagra, rather than the time-honored potion

of powdered male seal genitalia.

 

That's great news if you happen to be a harp seal. But

it's very bad news if you happen to be a sealer stuck

with a surplus of an improbable product.

 

''I've had sealers call to complain, `I got me freezer

full ... and not a Chinese wants to buy,''' said Tina

Fagan, director of the Canadian Sealers Association,

based in St. John's, Newfoundland. ''Whether it's

Viagra, I don't know, but the market is certainly

down.''

 

Fagan emphasized that her organization opposes the

slaughter of seals solely for their genitalia,

preferring ''full utilization'' of the creatures for

fur, leather, meat (used as animal feed or to produce

such delicacies as ''seal pepperoni''), and seal oil

vitamins.

 

Nonetheless, commercial hunters are so hard-pressed

these days that Asia's dwindling demand for

aphrodisiacs comes as an ugly surprise, she said.

 

Seal sex organs have long been prescribed by

practitioners of Asian traditional medicine as a cure

for impotence and waning desire. But ''increased use

of Vigara'' appears to be among the trends

undercutting the sealing industry, along with

declining demand for seal fur in the boutiques of

Scandinavia, a shriveling market for seal meat, and

the end of Ottawa's subsidies for the hunt, according

to the study by four marine biologists from Canada and

the United States.

 

''On Viagra, the evidence is purely anecdotal,'' said

Ian McLaren, a biologist at Nova Scotia's Dalhousie

University and leader of the research team. ''But we

heard from the sealers that the Asian market is drying

up and that modern pharmaceuticals may be the

reason.''

 

The rough-and-ready fishermen who hunt the seals don't

like to talk about it, but in the past decade or so

Canada has emerged as the most important exporter of

seal genitalia to the traditional medicine markets of

Southeast Asia. It packed off 30,290 in 1996, with a

value of $1 million.

 

There is nothing illegal about the traffic. Harp

seals, the most prolific and heavily-hunted species,

aren't endangered. And both Newfoundland's provincial

government and Canada's federal government encourage

seal hunting as a source of income for fishermen who

lost their livelihoods with the collapse of the

northern cod fishery in the early 1990s.

 

Nonetheless, the aphrodisiac trade quickly became an

embarrassment, as the annual arrival of millions of

seals to the whelping floes off Newfoundland and

Quebec's Iles de la Madeleine, the two main sealing

centers, brought another migration of close-lipped

Asian dealers to remote ''outports.''

 

Dockside haggling over 10-gallon tubs of seal parts

was a far cry from the hearty seagoing image that the

embattled industry longs to promote.

 

Even the St. John's Telegram, ardent defender of the

seal hunt, branded the peddling of seal sex parts to

China a ''sordid trade,'' although no one is entirely

clear on why killing a seal for its genitalia is

morally offensive while bashing its head for a pelt is

a rugged tradition.

 

However, the genitalia trade gave anti-sealing

campaigners, most prominently the Massachusetts-based

International Fund for Animal Welfare, fresh

ammunition for their emotional crusade against the

harvest.

 

''This bizarre international market for seal genitals

caused revulsion even among supporters of the hunt,''

said Rick Smith, director of the Canadian branch of

the International Fund.

 

Far fewer Asian traders are showing up in

Newfoundland, sealers say, and they blame Viagra even

more than seal-hunting opponents. The price for prime

seal genitalia has dropped from $25 to a few bucks, if

a buyer can be found at all.

 

''The prices won't cover cost of fuel and bullets,''

said Cecil Jones, a 53-year-old sealer from the

Northern Peninsula. ''Way I see it, them pills are

just one more kick against us poor Newfoundlanders.''

 

Harp seals are hunted commercially in Greenland,

Russia, and Norway, but Canada's harvest has been the

largest and by far the most controversial

target of international protests since the 1960s.

Protest campaigns revved up after French actress and

animal-lover Bardot posed beside a wide-eyed,

white-coated pup.

 

What strikes many as especially cruel about the hunt

is that the only practical time for bagging seals is

when they are gathered and giving birth on the vast

ice shelf that forms off Newfoundland and in the Gulf

of St. Lawrence. In a public relations move, Canada

banned the killing of newborn whitecoat pups in 1987;

harp seals assume a splotchy dark color after only a

few weeks of life, becoming beaters that can be shot

or clubbed to death with impunity.

 

For the past quarter-century, the spring hunt on the

treacherous floes has become a sort of ritualized

drama. As the hunters take to the ice in battered old

trawlers, they are dogged by helicopters chartered by

protest groups and packed with journalists, their long

lenses lingering on the bloody toil.

 

There are invariably celebrities on hand: Margot

Kidder one year, Martin Sheen the next, huffing

outrage into the microphones.

 

Opponents of the hunt try to paint it as an ecological

disaster, a view that most biologists dismiss. Seal

herds are more robust today than they have been for

decades, with the harp seal population pegged at 5.2

million, making the species no more endangered than

white-tail deer in New England.

 

But seals are such cute, engaging critters that they

seem more a creation of Disney's studios than spawn of

nature, which helps explain why anti-sealing groups

have raised hundreds of millions of dollars to fight

an industry worth maybe $10 million in a good year.

 

But there is hypocrisy, too, in Canada's efforts to

cast seals as prime villains in the crash of the cod

stocks, a genuine ecological disaster that was wrought

by decades of overfishing by Newfoundlanders and

foreign fleets alike and by Ottawa's ruinous fisheries

manangement practices.

 

When the cod were wiped out in the early '90s, almost

every fisherman was cast into poverty, and Canada was

desperate for a face-saving solution. Seals offered a

two-fer, a creature to accuse of gobbling the few

reamining codfish - a charge also dismissed by most

marine scientists - and whose harvest offered some

meagre employment for fishermen.

 

''One form of cynical zealotry seemed to spawn

another,'' observed Newfoundland writer Ray Guy in an

article last year for Canadian Geographic. ''And so

began the three-decade devil's dance over an industry

whose value to Canada's gross national product has

been equated to two McDonald's hamburger outlets.''

 

This story ran on page 8 of the Boston Globe on

3/22/2001.

Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company.

 

 

 

 

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