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On the ice floes off Eastern Canada a horror story is about to unfold. Over the coming days tens of thousands of baby seals will be clubbed and hacked to death. Hundreds of thousands more will be shot and left to die. The lucky ones will die swiftly. Many will suffer long lingering deaths.
Four years ago I was the first British journalist in a generation to witness the annual Canadian baby seal slaughter. I’ve been covering it for the Daily Mail ever since. It was the most traumatic and bewildering story I have ever covered – and one I am determined to continue exposing until the slaughter has ended.
I first caught sight of the slaughter from a helicopter circling 500 feet above the Gulf of St Lawrence. The ice was blood red. For as far as the eye could see, men were dragging bleeding baby seals across the ice. Huge piles of drippping carcasses littered the arctic wilderness.
When we landed the Canadians put on a show for us. One calmly walked over to a baby seal and belted her with his iron tipped club. Her jaw shattered and the sound of splintering bone filled the air. The sealer then flipped the baby over onto her back and began slicing open her throat. The seal began screaming and wriggling furiously. She was still alive and fully conscious. The sealer hit her again and began cutting open her stomach. The poor baby began screaming again, so the Canadian sealer hit her a third time. This time, I hoped, she was dead.
This was not unusual. I directly saw about one hundred seals slaughtered before my eyes. About half of them were skinned alive. I watched as these animals had their skins peeled off whilst they were struggling frantically to escape. Most were only two weeks old.
The Canadians justify this deliberate carnage by claiming that the seals eat valuable fish, such as cod. They claim that seal numbers need to be reduced so that hard-pressed fisheries can recover. This is an environmental fallacy of the first order. In reality, Man has forced cod to the edge of extinction and the seals may, paradoxically, help them return.
Thirty years ago Eastern Canada possessed some of the richest fishing grounds in the world. Throughout the 1980s, 800,000 tonnes of cod per year were caught off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland alone. But decades of mis-management, greed and stupidity wiped out the cod. The Grand Banks were finally closed to fishing in 1992 and have never re-opened.
After the collapse of their fishing industry, the Canadian Government poured in millions of dollars in subsidies to placate the fishermen – and to buy votes. They also began secretly encouraging the slaughter of baby seals. They made an ideal scapegoat. Seals eat fish, they argued, so if you kill seals, the cod will return.
There was just one problem with this approach. What do you do with all of the baby seal carcasses? Europe and America had long ago banned the import of seal products on moral grounds, and the rest of the world did not want seal fur. So, the Canadian Government did what all Governments do; they set up a committee.
It was soon realised that there was a loop-hole in the law banning the import of seals into the EU. The ban only applied to ‘young seals’, so the Canadians re-defined ‘young’ as being less than 12 days old. This allowed the skins of two week old baby seals to be sold in Europe.
The Canadian Government then spent millions of dollars subsidising the slaughter and in building seal processing plants. They also spent a small fortune devising new uses for seal products. These government bureaucrats came up with such delights as seal pizza topping, seal oil margarine and aphrodisiacs made from freeze-dried penises.
Over the past decade the Canadian authorities have year on year increased the size of the “seal harvest”. Last year they deemed that one million could be battered to death over a three year period. Apart from the obvious moral argument against battering to death a million seals, the cull is likely to do further damage to the cod fisheries and may even push the species to the edge of extinction.
Seals do eat cod but they also eat their predators too. Seals appear to love the taste of Arctic cod and will seek them out to feast upon. Arctic cod prey on the Atlantic cod, the commercial variety of the fish. They will also eat other cod predators. I have spoken to several marine biologists and they were unanimous in telling me that if you kill the seals you will probably reduce numbers of cod available to be caught by fishermen. So not only is the seal cull grossly inhumane, it is counter-productive too.
The cull may also be threatening the future of the species. No one factor drives a species to extinction, it is always the result of many interleaved causes Seals face many grave challenges. Climate change is altering the ice off the Canadian coast.
This may sound trivial but the timing of the ice-melt is crucial to the animals. If it melts earlly, the newborn seals will drown. A few years ago, this did indeed happen and a million newborns drowned. This year it looks likelty to happen again. If these ‘natural’ disasters increase in frequency then they could end up hitting the seal population hard. The build-up of toxic pollution is also affecting the ability of the animals to breed and is also weakening their immune systems. None of these factors will wipe-out the seals but in combination they may well do so.
It is too easy to feel helpless when you come face to face with the kind of barbarity I witnessed in Canada. It is easy to say to oneself ‘how can I change government policy?’ In reality, the Canadian Government can very easily be forced to abandon its support of the cull. First and foremost, a boycott of Canadian holidays could be hugely effective because the economic value of the cull is so tiny. A new campaign, called ‘boycott-canada.org’ aims to encourage just such a boycott.
British tourism is worth around £1 billion pounds per year to the Canadian ecomomy. If just one in one hundred British people take their holidays elsewhere then Canada would be a net loser. Simply writing to the Canadian embassy and telling them about your plans could have a huge impact. The address is shown below. Avoiding other Canadian products, such as maple syrup will be effective too.
Another approach would be to lobby our own Government to completely ban the import of seal products. The Netherlands, Italy and Germany are considering bringing forth similar legislation. The US Senate is expected to pass a resolution condemning the trade very soon. Pressure is also mounting on the EU to ban the trade completely across the whole of Europe. If this happens, then the slaughter will almost certainly end.
The Canadian’s are probably the most civilised people on earth so talking will help. But if we start taking our holidays elsewhere then they will certainly listen.
www.boycott-canada.org
The address of the Canadian High Commission is: 1 Grosvenor Square, London W1K 4AB
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