Sealing: Justifying the Hunt

by Kieran Mulvaney and Bruce McKay

Originally published in BBC Wildlife, May 1994.

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By the time you read this, hunters in the eastern Canadian province of Newfoundland will be crunching their way across the ice in pursuit of over a quarter of a million harp seals. It is the largest seal hunt in Canada - and indeed, the world - for many years, and has become the focus of renewed and intensified controversy from animal welfare and environmental groups in Britain and North America.

Officially, at least in part, the hunt is a response to the collapse of the Northwest Atlantic stocks of cod and other groundfish in 1992. Many fishermen blamed that collapse, which led to the loss of over 40,000 jobs and the decimation of entire communities in Newfoundland, on harp seals. The seals, they argued, had multiplied dramatically in numbers since the European Community imposed a ban on the import of seal furs in the early 1980s, in response to worldwide outrage at the clubbing of harp seal pups, or "whitecoats." The newly numerous pinnipeds had simply eaten the cod out of the area and needed to be controlled if fish stocks were to recover.

The Canadian government's message, on the other hand, was decidedly mixed, laying at least some of the blame at the seals, but focusing on other causes, such as natural climatic changes and over fishing - particularly by non-Canadian fisheries. In July 1994, then-Canadian fisheries minister Brian Tobin declared confidently that "Man has been a far greater predator on the stocks that disappeared. If we're going to recover them, it's more important to stop the two-legged predators and their pirate vessels than it is to go out and shoot seals."

By December 1995, however, fish stocks had still not rebounded and Newfoundland's economy showed no signs of recovering. There was, Tobin now declared, "only one major player" still fishing the cod. "His first name is harp and his second name is seal."

The minister announced that, beginning the following season, the quota for harp seals would be increased by thirty per cent, to 250,000. At a news conference announcing the increase, Tobin cited government statistics, which he claimed showed that harp seal numbers in the region numbered 4.8 million, double the number at the time of the EC ban and an increase of 1.8 million since 1990. At present rates of reproduction, by the end of the century there would be 6 million. Already, Tobin argued, seals were eating an estimated 140,000 tons of cod annually; unless their numbers were controlled and reduced, there seemed little prospect of fish stocks recovering in the near future.

Critics dispute that there is any correlation between seal populations and fisheries declines. At a meeting of the Society of Marine Mammologists in Florida last year, ninety-seven scientists from fifteen countries signed onto a statement that was strongly critical of the government's intentions.

"All scientific efforts to find an effect of seal predation on Canadian groundfish stocks have failed to show any impact," the statement read. "Overfishing remains the only scientifically demonstrated problem ... If fishing closures continue, the evidence indicates that stocks will recover, and killing seals will not speed that process."

Such scientists point out that cod constitutes only around one per cent of a harp seal's diet. Supporters of the hunt counter that seals also eat capelin, which is cod's principal food, and are therefore depressing cod numbers that way. But ecosystem dynamics, their detractors argue, are far too complex and poorly-understood to support such simplistic cause-and effect claims; after all, seals also eat several species which prey on cod and so could just as easily be helping the stock to rebound.

The real reason for the increase in the seal hunt, hunt opponents maintain, has little to do with a genuine belief that killing seals will assist a recovery in the cod. By granting an increased quota, they argue, the government aims to do two things.

Firstly, it provides a convenient scapegoat for the continued depression of both cod stocks and the Newfoundland economy, allowing fishermen and government alike to focus on a common enemy to avoid facing up to their own complicity in the crisis. If so, it wouldn't be the first time that that tactic has been successfully employed: during a United Nations Conference convened to address problems such as those facing the Northwest Atlantic groundfish stocks, Canada frequently railed against fishing just outside the Canadian 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone by foreign fishing vessels, even at one stage boarding and arresting a Spanish trawler operating in international waters. In the process, the government succeeded in shifting the focus for the cod stock's collapse on to these foreign ships, despite the fact that the vast majority of the fishing responsible for the stock's collapse was conducted by Canadian fishing vessels.

Secondly, critics argue, the increased hunt is part of a continued effort to boost the market for seal products worldwide, so that some of what Newfoundlanders have lost through the decline of the fishery can be replaced by a return to commercial sealing. Although the total allowable catch for the last several years has been 186,000, catches have generally been around 60,000, partly because ice conditions have not always been favourable in recent years, but mainly also because the bottom dropped out of the international market for seal products at the time of the whitecoat ban and has never recovered, even though whitecoats are no longer being hunted.

A study conducted last year for the Northwest Territories seal industry found that the market for seal meat, for both animal and human consumption, was poor. So were the markets for fur and for seal oil for industrial use. Seal oil for health products and seal leather for accessories were reckoned to have the greatest potential, although both faced high development costs and the latter would have to contend with "marketing problems," which is another way of pointing out that its two major potential export markets - the EU and the United States - maintained a ban on seal products.

Only one product was rated as having "excellent" economic prospects: seal penises, which are in great demand in China for use in aphrodisiacs. Although Tobin insists that no seals are killed specifically for their penises, there is evidence that suggests otherwise. The percentage of adults among seals killed in the hunt has grown from 20 per cent prior to 1993 to 65 and 49 per cent over the past two years. A company last year reportedly offered sealers twice as much for a male carcass as a female one. The International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), one of the most vocal critics of the hunt, alleges that the 1994 export of 50,000 seals to a Shanghai company, ostensibly for their pelts and meat, was in fact "a cover-up to cash in on the lucrative sex-potion market."

For at least some of the sealers, whether seals are killed for their meat, fur or penises is probably moot. The Newfoundland culture is, in large part, based on getting as much as possible from the marine environment (and frequently too much - see box). For years, that was centered around hunting seals, a livelihood that was snatched from them when animal welfare groups used emotional images of helpless whitecoats to bring the market crashing down. Particularly at a time of extreme economic hardship, any opportunity to expand the demand for seal products is likely to be widely welcomed.

Unfortunately, truth is always among the first casualties in such affairs and the claim by some campaigners that the hunt needs to be addressed because "seals are endangered" is as dubious as Tobin's assertions that seals are all but eating the North Atlantic out of fish. Addressing an issue as intractable as sealing - involving, as it does, strong emotions, a multiplicity of viewpoints and cultural differences - is difficult enough as it is. When those involved use doubtful science and political pandering to obscure their true intentions and motivations, the likelihood of it ever being resolved to anyone's satisfaction looks very remote indeed.

FACTS IN BRIEF:

The harp seal hunt is hardly the first case of marine species being extensively hunted in Atlantic Canada. A small selection of other cases:

• Atlantic walrus -- hunted to extinction from all areas south of Labrador by mid-1800s.
• Sea mink -- hunted into extinction by 1900.
• Grey seal -- hunted so severely that this population was believed extinct in 1949; has since recovered and has recently been the subject of culls as part of Canadian fisheries management programmes.
• Great auk -- hunted into extinction by the mid-1800s.
• Thick-billed murre -- in recent years anywhere between 1/2 to 1 million murres have been killed annually by Canadians and Greenlanders. Canadian quota of 350,000 recently implemented.
• Labrador duck -- hunted into extinction by 1875.
• Harlequin duck -- classified as "endangered"; less than 1,000 remain for all of eastern North America; populations continue to decline, probably as a result of ongoing hunting.
• The harp, or Greenland, seal (Phoca groenlandicus), is one of the most abundant seal species in the world.
• The world's harp seals are generally divided into three breeding populations: Northwest Atlantic, off the Canadian east coast; White Sea, off the coast of Russia; and the "West Ice" between Jan Mayen Island and Svalbard (Spitsbergen).
• Males and females both grow to approximately 169 cm (5 1/2 feet) and 130kg (286 lb).
• Whitecoats, the most familiar image of harp seals, are pups aged between roughly four and twelve days. Whitecoats are no longer hunted; instead, hunters concentrate on "beaters" (pups aged around 25 days) and older.