Launch of the Commercial Seal Hunt
Alroy Fonseca
(Cult)ure Magazine, May 2008
On 28 March, 2008, sealers launched the annual commercial harp seal hunt in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, aiming to slaughter 275,000 seals. And, just as in past years, this year’s hunt was accompanied by its share of controversies and debate over the same set of issues. I will thus throw in my two-cents here, hoping to provide a bit of clarity on some of the questions, but will preface my comments by making my position known ahead of time: I oppose the commercial seal hunt. So, let’s get right into it...
In recent times, those who support the hunt have often taken issue with the photos of white- pelted baby seals used by animal welfare activists in campaigns, which they say mislead the public. They argue – correctly – that in Canada it is illegal to hunt these ‘whitecoat’ seals, and that only the older (less attractive) silver-pelted ones are targeted.
Yet, this line of argument is rather meaningless given that baby seals shed their white pelts 12 to 18 days after birth. What exactly is the difference between shooting and clubbing to death an 18- day old seal versus doing the same to a 10-day old seal? Why is one somehow acceptable and not the other? An April 2004 account of the hunt appearing in the New York Times illustrates the point: “Here on ice patches of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, the hunt looks nearly as brutal as ever. For as far as the eye can see, dozens of burly men bearing clubs roam the ice in snowmobiles and spiked boots in search of silvery young harp seals. With one or two blows to the head, they crush the skulls, sometimes leaving the young animals in convulsions. The men drag the bodies to waiting fishing vessels or skin them on the spot, leaving a crisscross of bloody trails on the slowly melting ice.” Taking issue with activists’ use of white-pelted seals is disingenuous because all those white seals in the hunt zone are just days away from a brutal death.
This brings us to another point raised by proponents, namely that the killing is acceptable given that various studies have shown that shooting or clubbing a seal is humane. But for every such study cited by the proponents of the seal hunt, there is a study presented by its opponents attesting to its barbarity. The truth of the matter is that, like other scientific inquiries pertaining to the cognitive capacities of animals, there is no comfortable certainty in the conclusions of the various studies. And, when there is insufficient certainty on such an important issue – that is, the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of living beings – it seems like the ‘humane’ thing to do is to adopt the precautionary principle and assume that suffering is experienced. At the very least, those who support the hunt should not pretend certainty when claiming that studies show that the killing is humane.
But the debate between the various studies serves more to distract than to clarify. The hakapik, the tool often used to kill seals in the Gulf of St. Lawrence (versus riffles in the northern fronts) is extremely crude. It’s difficult to imagine how such a tool could be used to render any killing spree ‘humane’ in character.
Mary Richardson, the former chair of the Animal Welfare Committee of the Ontario Veterinary Medical Association, commented in the pages of National Post in June 2005: “Given the size of the animal and the weapons the men are allowed to use, a quick death cannot be guaranteed... There is also a time constraint. The sealers are paid per seal they kill, not by the hour. They compete against each other to fill quotas, making it necessary for them to collect huge numbers of animals in a very short time. This means sealers rarely take the time to ensure each animal is dead before moving on to the next one... And finally, the conditions for the seal hunt are precarious. The ice floes shift and break, never ensuring a firm footing.” So forget the scientific studies.
The very context of the killing – its incentives, its speed, its location, and its tools – make the hunt inherently more likely than not to cause great suffering. There seems to be a strong element of wishful thinking informing assertions that the slaughter of seals – or any animal for that matter – can be ‘humane’ under these kinds of circumstances. With respect to riffles, furthermore, the same environment and pace makes it very difficult to hunt with precision – again, no need for a scientific study to see something so obvious.
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Despite increasing demand for seal products from markets like Russia, there is a growing global trend against the hunt. The United States already bans the commercial seal hunt and a growing number of countries are working to ban the importation of seal products.
In January 2007, Belgium became the first European Union (EU) country to institute such a ban, following a September 2006 European Parliament resolution in favour of a union-wide ban. Moreover, the EU is now considering a ban on the importation of seal products into all member- states. To this end, Stavros Dimas, the EU’s Environment Commissioner, complained that last year Canada blocked an EU observation team from determining if the hunt is humane: “If a team of experts wasn't able to look at what is happening, and how it [the hunt] is being conducted, why do they (the Canadian government) claim that [the] other evidence is not correct?”
As an important aside, it should be noted that groups that have been very active on the campaign to stop the hunt, such as the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), have clearly stated that they do not oppose subsistence hunting of seals by the Inuit, and that exemptions should be granted accordingly. Because of the legacy of injustice perpetrated against Canada’s aboriginal communities, most activists are rightly wary about telling the Inuit how they should live their lives. A ban on the seal hunt would, however, have economic consequences for the non- aboriginal communities that are involved in it. According to the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, between 5,000 and 6,000 sealers from the province participate in the hunt, and more than 90% of harp seals are harvested by this group.
Yet, it is important to understand that the seal hunt represents only a tiny fraction of the overall fishing industry. In 2005, the value of landed seal pelts was approximately $16.5 million (in 2007, it was $12 million), with an after-processing market-value of a couple of times higher. In contrast, consider that in 2005, in Newfoundland alone, the fisheries industry was valued at $600 million, while the entire economy– that is, the province’s gross domestic product – was pegged at $17.1 billion. Even so, it needs to be acknowledged that for some individual sealers the hunt can, by some accounts, constitute as much as a third of the year’s income.
The flip side of all this is that the federal government spends millions of dollars annually patrolling the hunt (for monitoring and rescue), managing it (via a large bureaucratic apparatus), promoting it (by funding overseas visits by various delegations), and litigating on its behalf (including through the recent lodging of complaints at the World Trade Organization in Geneva against the Netherlands and Belgium for their work to ban the importation of seal products). All this leads one to tentatively conclude, in the absence of accurate figures from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, that the net economic gain resulting from the seal hunt is actually quite small. In the event that the seal hunt is banned, money used for the above activities could – in fact, should – be redirected to provide financial support to affected communities.
Additionally, we should compare the $16.5 million figure (or even the market value figure, which is no more than $40 million) to the billions in tax dollars that are used for corporate welfare in Canada. A 2007 study by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation found that between fiscal years 1982 and 2005 numerous publicly-unaccountable corporations received very large sums of public money in the form of “grants, contributions, loans, interest contributions and loan guarantees.” Topping the list were Pratt & Whitney at $1.496 billion, Bombardier at $745 million, General Motors Canada at $361 million, Bell Helicopter at $339 million, and CAE at $321 million. Furthermore, just in fiscal year 2005-06, Industry Canada assistance to corporations amounted to a whopping $1.017 billion.
So, if we can afford to give these corporations billions of dollars in assistance (whether we should do so is a question for another day), I see no reason why we cannot give individual hunters and their communities the necessary funds to alleviate the financial pain that would result from a seal-hunt ban, while also helping them develop new skills to supplement their incomes (for example, eco-tourism is one idea that has been tossed around).
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Sealers seem to be a little confused by the opposition. One Jason Pence, captain of the Ryan’s Pride, told a journalist as his ship set sail for the hunt from Newfoundland a few years ago that seal hunting was like “taking the heads off chickens, butchering cows, and butchering pigs. People are just trying to make a living.” True enough, there is a tension here waiting to be resolved one way or another.
The mass slaughter of chickens, cows, and pigs in factory farms is, for all intents and purposes, just as barbaric and inhumane as that of seals. It should be stopped, and many of the animal welfare groups active on the sealing issue are also quite active in fighting factory farms. So which way do we go? Accept the seal hunt, because the other animal slaughters are also barbaric? Or, work to end the seal hunt, and use any progress on this front as a launch pad for further progress on other concurrent animal welfare initiatives? The latter seems like the most reasonable option, consistent with the notion – which I will assume is uncontroversial – that we should strive to reduce suffering in the world if we can.
It is quite likely the case that a significant portion of the public’s support for the anti-seal hunt campaign is attributable to the physical beauty of the animal. Seals are cute and fuzzy, no doubt. But another important and often overlooked reason for the public’s support is that, being an open-air hunt, it is much easier for well-funded activist groups to produce good footage of the brutality of the killing. Indeed, over the years, various organizations have amassed an impressive quantity of high-quality film documenting the hunt, and this can be easily shown on the news and distributed through other media.
By contrast, footage of the abuses and brutality perpetrated against cows in slaughterhouses is very hard to get, and whatever film is gained clandestinely tends to be quite dark and grainy; slaughterhouse operations are kept closed to the public for obvious reasons. Moreover, the large corporations that own the factory farms – or rely on them – are also big television advertisers (for example, meat producers like Kraft Foods/Oscar Mayer and Maple Leaf Foods, and fast-food chains like McDonald’s and Burger King) making it unlikely that such footage would receive much coverage on the major news networks, which all heavily depend on ad dollars to function. But if good slaughterhouse footage were available, and if (somehow) it were broadcast on the evening news, it would likely have a significant impact on public opinion, much like footage of the seal hunt. So it’s not just about the seal being cute. In any case, that public support may be significantly reliant on the image of a cute seal being killed should not lead one to dismiss the real ethical problems with the hunt.
It’s difficult to foresee where things will go in the immediate future, and whether the EU will institute a ban, but there is good reason to believe that substantial gains will be made in this campaign over the longer term. Nevertheless, the campaign to ban seal-hunting is an important advancement on the path towards sensitizing the public to the poor treatment of animals by humans.
Postscript: I will briefly address here what is, in my view, one of the more ridiculous arguments offered in favour of the seal hunt. It is claimed by some that seals have an almost uncontrollable appetite for fish, particularly cod, and that it is therefore necessary for us to hunt seals in order to ensure that they do not deplete fish stocks. In December 1995, the International Society for Marine Mammalogists issued the following statement: “All scientific efforts to find an effect of seal predation on Canadian groundfish stocks have failed to show any impact ... the evidence indicates that stocks will recover, and killing seals will not speed that process.” In an era of commercial trawlers and dragnet techniques that inflict tremendous ecological damage in order to satisfy our tastebuds, what arrogance to suggest that seals are the real culprits behind the depletion of fish stocks in the North Altlantic.