Overview of The Canadian Seal Kill

[Guest guest]

Overview of The Canadian Seal Kill

 

 

SEAL WARS by Captain PAUL WATSON

 

Source > http://www.harpseals.org/hunt/sealwars.html

 

On February 3rd, 2003, the Canadian

Department of Fisheries and Oceans announced a kill

quota of 350,000 harp seals each year for the next

three years.

 

Last year the quota was 275,000. The sealers

slaughtered over 310,000. There were no legal

consequences for the quota overkill. Instead the

Canadian government has rewarded the kill quota

violations with an incredible increase of 75,000

seals.

 

There is also no scientific justification for the

quota. The seal counting techniques amount to little

more than guesswork The number of harp seals range

from a low of 2.5 million to a high of 6 million

depending on which side of the issue the report

originates with.

 

The quota appears to be set each year by the

number of seals taken the year before, in other words,

an estimate of how many it is possible to kill. The

primary demand for the seal pelts is in Denmark and

Eastern Europe, and this market has become glutted due

to excessive kills over the last few years, so much so

that pelt prices are falling, and this means more

government subsidies to prop up the sealers. Canada is

also spending tax dollars to lobby the United States

to revoke the Marine Mammal Protection Act to open

markets there.

 

This lust to kill the seals is reflected in the

following statement made by former Newfoundland

Fisheries Minister John Efford to the Newfoundland

Legislature:

 

“Mr. Speaker, I would like to see the six million, or

whatever number is out there, killed or sold, or

destroyed or burned. I do not care what happens to

them. The fact is that the markets are not there to

sell more seals. What they (the fishermen) wanted was

to have the right to go out and kill the seals. They

have that right, and the more they kill the better I

will love it.”

 

There are facts about this slaughter that are

indisputable:

 

° The Canadian Harp seal hunt is the largest single

mass slaughter of a mammalian wildlife species

anywhere in the world.

 

° It is grossly inhumane. Credible witnesses,

including myself, have seen seals skinned alive and

tortured. These incidents have been documented and

sealers themselves have bragged and written about how

much fun it is to torture a seal.

 

° It is an incredibly wasteful hunt. Canadian author

and naturalist, Farley Mowat, estimates that for every

seal landed, another is shot and lost under the ice,

not to be included in the quota.

 

Canada retaliates by saying that the hunt is

well-managed and humane. The problem with this

statement is that it is difficult to verify by

independent witnesses because it is a crime in Canada

to approach within a half a nautical mile of a seal

hunt to photograph, film, or even witness a kill

without permission of the Canadian government. We are

expected to take the word of the sealers and the

government that the hunt is humane although most

independent observers, who have risked and suffered

arrest attest otherwise.

 

The Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans

insists that the seals must die so that cod

populations can increase and their position is that

the harp seal is a major predator of the cod. Yet,

there is little scientific justification for this

position.

 

On the contrary, studies and analysis of stomach

contents of harp seals indicate that cod is a very

small part of a harp seals diet. The largest predators

of young cod are in fact other fish species, the same

species that serve as the primary prey of the harp

seals. In other words, the reduction of harp seal

populations is resulting in the increase of fish that

prey on cod, and this of course translates into less

cod.

 

This is the same Canadian Department of Fisheries

and Oceans responsible for the mismanagement of the

cod fishery in the first place. In fact the only thing

DFO can be relied upon to do - is to make a

bureaucratic mess and economic disaster of every

fishery it has attempted to manage. Why should we

expect them to manage the seals any better?

 

When the first European explorers landed on the

East coast of Canada there was no shortage of cod, and

there were an estimated 30 million seals. Now, with

cod populations at less than 1% of pre-Columbian

levels, the seal has become the scapegoat for the

excesses of the Canadian and foreign drag trawler

fleets that plundered the Grand Banks for decades, and

left very little behind.

 

Over one million harp seals are condemned to be

cruelly slaughtered over the next three years.

 

As a Canadian, I am ashamed. As a

conservationist, I am appalled. As a human being, I am

angered by Canada’s butchery. This bureaucratic

ordered destruction of the seals has no place in the

21st Century.