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 All around me I could see clubs descending on the pitiful faces of seal pups, many just three weeks old. The sound of shattering skulls echoed across the snowy wilderness. I watched in impotent horror as one fisherman leapt across the ice to a group of pups. One looked up with innocent curiosity. He smacked her in the face with his club, pulverising her jaw. Blood spewed out of her mouth and spattered across the ice. She screamed a long drawn out agony.
The fisherman then lashed out like a blood-crazed maniac at every seal within range. In less than a minute, ten seals were left writhing on the ice with blood streaming from their mouths and nostrils.
But this was just the start of a day of unimaginable sadism and cruelty. From my vantage point I saw an injured seal pup slowly drowning in a deep pool of meltwater. Blood bubbled from his shattered nose. Pitiful gasps of pain and terror escaped his mouth. A campaigner from the Humane Society of the United States helped the poor creature back to the safety of the ice, so he could die a less horrific death. But the poor creature stubbornly refused to die and clung desperately to life.
The campaigners then spent over an hour trying to sort out a way of airlifting the injured seal to a veterinary college on the mainland. But just as success seemed near, the Canadian seal clubbers returned to chase away the campaigners, clubs in hand. The fishermen then idly watched the poor seal as he whimpered in pain.
After a while they grew bored and wandered off to batter a few more infants before returning to taunt the dying seal. They eventually killed him. The poor creature was in agony for one and a half hours. When the fishermen had finally skinned the seal, his pelt with have earned them around 30 pounds.
Over the coming days the sickening scenes I witnessed will be repeated until virtually every seal pup in the area has been wiped out. This year, around 270,000 infants have been targeted for destruction by the Canadian authorities. Last year 350,000 were killed. The slaughter quota was only reduced because global warming has reduced the number of seals.
This year tens of thousands of seals have drowned because the ice they were born upon has melted unusually early through global warming. They seals are born on the ice and are incapable of swimming until they are several weeks old. So instead of being just clubbed to death in the southern Gulf of Saint Lawrence the seals will also be shot.
The seals are still too young to swim and are pathetically vulnerable in the water. The fishermen take full advantage of their weakness. They ram the melting ice pans to tip the creatures into the water. They then pick the struggling pups off with rifles.
I watched in horror as shots rained down on the struggling pups and one by one they were hit. The lucky ones were killed in an instant but many escaped to die later of their wounds. Once hit they were hauled aboard the boats and skinned – sometimes alive – and the carcasses thrown back into the water. The pelts lay piled up on the ships’ decks, which quickly became drenched in blood. It was a sickening sight which will haunt me for years.
This season, battle has been joined by a coalition of animal welfare and environmental charities from Britain and abroad. As well as bearing witness to the horrific slaughter, they are organising an international boycott of Canadian fish. In the 1980s, a similar boycott helped bring an equally horrific cull to a shuddering halt. Then, as now, seals were blamed for declining fish stocks.
Given that the fishermen receive around 95 per cent of their income from fish, they are uniquely vulnerable to a boycott. Campaigners hope that once consumers realise that they are indirectly funding the slaughter of seal pups, they will stop buying Canadian fish. Virtually all of Canada’s fish exports go Britain, the US and Japan. Without these valuable export markets, the fishermen would have neither the money nor inclination to kill seals.
 Mark Glover, of Respect for Animals, the British animal welfare group spearheading the fish boycott, says: “We as consumers have the power to stop this carnage. The only thing these fishermen seem to understand is money. We can hit them in their pockets by not buying their fish.”British supermarkets have already begun reviewing their fish buying policies. Tesco and Waitrose rushed to reassure Newsmonster that none of their suppliers are involved in seal clubbing. Iceland and Sainsbury’s do not stock Canadian fish. Only the Co-op failed to state whether it would continue stocking Canadian fish. The
Canadian authorities are clearly rattled by the possibility of a consumer backlash. A spokesman for the Department for Fisheries and Oceans says: “If the boycott is successful then the fishermen will suffer. It will hurt those who can afford it the least. They are trying to make a living. That’s all.” International outrage against this year’s slaughter has reached unprecedented levels. Belgium has banned the import of all seal products, such as leather. The Governments of France, Germany and Italy are all considering following suit. The EU is coming under increasing pressure to extend its ban on seal pelts and the European Parlianment has voted for a complete ban. The present ban only applies to seals less than twelve days old. This allows fishermen to profit from battering to death seals just a few days older.In the UK, a the Government says it supports a European Ban and will continue pushing for it.
All this pressure is beginning to weigh on certain parts of the Canadian establishment. One official quietly told the Daily Mail: “This is the worst thing that has ever happened to Canada’s image abroad. Our politicians have dug themselves into a hole.”
But this concern for their “image” has not stopped the authorities from actively encouraging the culling of at least another million seals from of a total population of just five million. It’s probably the biggest slaughter of marine mammals in history.
Of itself, the Canadian seal destruction plan is unlikely to drive the animals to extinction but they face many other grave threats. Global warming is melting the ice pans they need to breed. A build-up of toxic industrial pollution is reducing their fertility and damaging their immune systems. The fishermen may simply be the last straw.
If all this seems familiar, then it probably is. The fishermen have a long history of despoiling Canada’s east coast. In the nineteenth century they committed the first genocide in recorded history when they wiped out the native Indian population of Newfoundland. Soon after they eradicated the Great Auk, a magnificent flightless seabird. They also annihilated the walruses and grey seals. But their biggest blunder, so far, was to over-fish and destroy the Grand Banks cod fishery in the late 1980s, once the world’s richest.
But the lessons of these past calamities are ignored in the fishing communities of Canada. Instead, they hate and blame the seals for all their ills. And this hatred is played out on the melting ice pans. In the space of an hour I watched this bitterness being taken out on hundreds of infant seals. But it was only from the air that the true scale of the horror became apparent.
Lakes of blood, some covering several acres, lay scattered across the ice from horizon to horizon. Huge piles of steaming carcases cooled in the icy mist. Skidoos loaded with blood-soaked pelts criss-crossed the ice at breakneck speed.
From my vantage point in a helicopter slowly circling the killing zones, I could see the fishermen sweeping slowly across the ice, killing as they went, clearly not caring whether the seals died a quick clean death or a slow agonising one. Unfortunately for the seals, barbaric death is the norm. Professor Stephen Harris, a wild mammal expert from Bristol University, has witnessed the cull first hand and describes it as “unimaginably cruel”.
“The impression I got was of the fishermen’s complete indifference to suffering,” he says. “It’s the worst kind of cruelty I have ever seen and the fishermen clearly don’t give a damn.”
A casual observer would be forgiven for asking why the fishermen are allowed to get away with such barbarity. Nowhere else in the civilised world allows such cruelty to go unpunished and yet it is actively encouraged in Canada.
The unsettling truth is that Canadians seem to view wildlife completely differently to the rest of the developed world. Infant seals are hated in Canada. The nation’s fishermen have managed to characterise one of the most beautiful and gentle creatures on Earth as a bogeyman responsible for decimating fish stocks. As a consequence, Canadians attack and slaughter two week old seals with a ferocity that’s almost impossible to believe.
Unbelievably, this degree of cruelty has many defenders. Whilst the fishermen appear to genuinely love their work they also come armed with the excuses needed to justify their actions. The seals, they claim, have destroyed commercial fish stocks. Kill the seals, they argue, and the fish will return. Virtually no reputable scientists agree with their claims.
Despite the weight of scientific arguments to the contrary, the fishermen have garnered the whole-hearted support of the Canadian Government, particularly John Efford, until recently the minister of Natural Resources. He has openly stated that as far as he is concerned the more seals the fishermen kill “the better I will love it”. He has also urged the fishermen to ‘kill, sell, destroy or burn’ as many seals as possible.
Ugly politics effectively silences the voices of those who oppose the slaughter. In Canada, a politician that promise to slaughter more seals gains the votes of the nation’s fishermen. As most of these inhabit the marginal constituencies of the eastern seaboard, they wield disproportionate power. As a consequence, politicians of all persuasions constantly outbid each other in the number of seals they allow to be killed. To make matters worse, the media hardly ever covers the cull and consistently refuses to publish pictures of the carnage.
To buy even more votes, Canadian politicians have in recent years poured millions into the cull in the form of hidden subsidies. It has built and staffed seal processing plants, and helped open new export markets in the far east for such delights as seal penis aphrodisiacs. It is developing new “health foods” based upon seal oil. The Government also sends out ice breakers to open up the sea lanes for the fishermen. The Coastguard has even taken to planting radio beacons amongst the seal colonies so the fishermen can find them easily. And if that wasn’t enough, the Canadian Coastguard tries to ram the ships of those opposing the cull.
But Resistance to the seal cull is slowly growing in Canada. They have begun to realise that the slaughter is an affront to a civilised society. Economic pressure from Britain, Europe and the USA is also likely to make life increasingly uncomfortable for the fishermen. They rely on fish exports for a significant slice of their income.
“We have the future of these beautiful animals in our hands,” says Mark Glover who is in Canada to witness this year’s cull. “Canadian fish comes steeped in the blood of countless seals.”
∑ For further information on the seal cull and fish boycott see http://www.respectforanimals.org
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