| Canada's Secret Seal Slaughter |
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| Animals | |
| Written by Danny Penman | |
 Newfoundland, Eastern CanadaThe Canadian fisherman took aim with his long black rifle. A baby seal gazed at him expectantly. He was barely six weeks old and had never before seen a human being, let alone one armed to the teeth with a vicious-looking gun. As the pup wriggled slowly across the ice to greet this interesting new visitor, the fisherman closed one eye and pulled the trigger. As the bullet tore into the baby’s body a broad grin spread across the fisherman’s face. In an instant a huge fountain of blood spurted out of his tiny body. The poor creature began twitching uncontrollably. The fisherman turned to his friend to share a joke as the pup floundered around on a small patch of ice, his lifeblood puddling all around him. After what seemed an eternity the Canadian fisherman slowly took aim again and fired another shot into the tiny creature’s body. A thin mist of blood sprayed into the air. After a further two shots the seal pup stopped twitching. Another fisherman then nonchalantly smashed the pup in the face with a hakapik and dragged his body across the ice. His pelt will have earned the fisherman around £30. Over the coming days the sickening scenes I witnessed yesterday will be repeated until virtually every seal pup in the area has been slaughtered. This year 270,000 infants have been targeted for destruction by the Canadian Government. Around 60,000 have already been battered to death in the Gulf of St Lawrence during the now familiar seal clubbing season. But even this wholesale slaughter will soon pale into insignificance. Over the coming days another 210,000 seals will be shot in a brutal and secretive cull that the Canadian authorities are desperate to conceal from the outside world. They are so keen to hide it that journalists have been arrested and campaigners attacked by fishermen to keep them away from the killing zones. So desperate are they to prevent journalists documenting the slaughter that a car I was travelling in was rammed and forced off the road by angry fishermen. Six trucks then chased us across open fields and sand dunes and repeatedly smashed into us. Other fishermen pelted us with bricks and rocks. Several vehicles, including mine, were written-off in the series of attacks. “I knew they would beat up the men but I was worried the would rape me,” says Vera Weber, coordinator of the Switzerland-based Franz Weber animal welfare charity, who was travelling in my car. “They were shouting at us ‘we’ll kiss the girl, we’ll kiss the girl. I don’t think the kisses would be affectionate ones.” We eventually escaped the fishermen and made it back to our hotel where a violent mob was lying in wait for us. We spent the next ten hours imprisoned. The Canadian police, Mounties and authorities all refused to help us. They only stepped in after the US State Department, and the British, Swedish and German Embassies demanded that the Canadian police take action to free us. Even then the Canadian authorities did their utmost to stop us witnessing the slaughter by mysteriously withdrawing our permits to view the cull. Airports also began refusing to sell us fuel for our helicopters and passed on our flight plans to the fishermen. As a result we were met with hostility in whichever town we tried to hide in. We ended up flying nearly 1,000 miles in a series of short hops to shake off our pursuers. I did eventually manage to gain access to the area of the North West Atlantic known as “The Front” to witness the slaughter, the first journalist for several decades to do so. 
To make the job even more difficult, the seals are also bobbing about in the water or on small pieces of floating slushy ice. As a result the fishermen rarely get a clean shot at a seal so many are simply wounded and manage to escape. Vast numbers later die a slow agonising death from their wounds. The Canadian authorities claim that “only” around five percent of animals are shot and subsequently escape. Independent studies put the figure as high as 50 percent. If true, this means a staggering additional 105,000 baby seals will die a grisly painful death in Canada’s ‘secret’ seal slaughter. In total, up to 375,000 infant seals – many just a few weeks old – will be slaughtered by Canadian fishermen during the current season alone. The fishermen seemed delighted yesterday with the prospect of killing so many seals. But their exuberance may prove to be short-lived as this season the battle has been joined by a coalition of animal welfare charities from Britain and abroad. As well as bearing witness to the horrific slaughter, they are organising an international boycott of Canadian fish and holidays. 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 to 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.” Over 400 retailers in the US have already stopped selling Canadian fish. This alone has cost the fishermen $160 million in lost sales alone, claims Glover. Campaigners hope that the big UK supermarkets such as Tesco and Sainsbury’s will soon join the boycott. If this happens the sealers will be dealt a crippling blow. 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. At present it applies only to seals less than twelve days old. This allows fishermen to profit from killing seals just a few days older. The American Senate recently passed a motion deploring the slaughter. In the UK, a Parliamentary Early Day Motion condemning the cull and calling for a ban on the import of seal products into Britain has been signed by 188 MPs. The EDM also noted the boycott of Canadian fish but fell short of endorsing 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 very publicly promoting and defending the cull. Phil Jenkins, spokesman for the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, says that the slaughter is a vital source of income for hard-pressed fishing communities. “The fishermen do it for the money and it’s absolutely necessary for them to make that money. Many of the sealers are from poor isolated areas and they simply do not have any other opportunities. There has been a decline in income from such things as cod fishing. The fishermen often have a family income of only $35,000 a year so the chance to make another $5,000-10,000 from an activity such as sealing can make a big difference to their lives.” Although the slaughter is undoubtedly cruel, conservationists are now beginning to fear that it may also help wipe out the harp seal population. Of itself, the annual hunt 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 of their ills. And this hatred is played out on the seas and ice floes of Newfoundland and Labrador. From my vantage point in a helicopter slowly circling the killing zones yesterday, I could see dozens of fishing boats criss-crossing the pack-ice. Each boat was manned with several marksmen, each intent on killing as many pups as possible and 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. This is because of a brand of ugly regional politics that 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. 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. Taking holidays in Canada and buying anything Canadian helps fuel the slaughter.” For further information on the seal cull and fish boycott see http://www.respectforanimals.org Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites           |
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