Harp Seal Hunt - Canada’s Annual Spring Slaughter

By David Nickarz

In Winnipeg, the snow is melting and the roads are getting sandy and dirty in the process. At this time last year I was in the Gulf of St. Lawrence on the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society ship the Farley Mowat. We took our ship from warm Bermuda to the ice to observe the Canadian seal hunt.

Every year, Canada allows the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of seal pups under three months old to be brutally killed for the fur trade. The seals in the first part of the hunt are as young as three weeks old—they cannot swim and haven’t eaten solid food yet.

Thousands of off season fishermen come out to bash their heads in with long poles with hooks on the end. Sometimes they don’t waste their effort and just hook the seal in the head and drag it across the ice. The two times that I’ve seen the hunt first hand, there were seals skinned alive.

The anger that I feel towards the sealers is sometimes overwhelming. That anger can be kept inside, but that’s really not good for you. After witnessing the seal hunt in 2005, I came home with a mild case of post-traumatic stress. I couldn’t talk about what I saw. I would burst into tears when my lover asked me why I was acting strange.

Later that year I had to deal with cancer. Now before you accuse me of saying ‘the seal hunt gave me cancer’—it didn’t. There are many factors which caused my cancer, including my sedentary lifestyle and environmental toxins like pesticides. I’m happy to say that I’m getting to the gym a few times a week and I no longer chase pesticide-spewing trucks around anymore.

I was on the seal hunt with the Sea Shepherds again last spring. We watched a sealer calmly slice open a seal pup while it struggled its best to get away. Those of us on the bridge of the Mowat were shocked into silence. The seal hunt is much worse than any picture that I can show you, any video or any statistics could ever tell.

We then learned that four sealers had died while being towed by the Canadian Coast Guard. The crew was genuinely shocked at the news. Our shock was then tempered by the memory of watching that seal suffer a horrible, torturous death at the hands of those same men who died.

How do you have sympathy for men who spent their lives practicing such cruelty? I certainly wouldn’t like to die like they did, but that’s where our compassion for the dead sealers ended.

The media and sealers asked Paul to stop our protests to respect the sealers who died. Paul said that the seal hunt wasn’t stopping for their deaths, and that the deaths of the sealers was tragic, but the deaths of hundreds of thousands of baby seals was more tragic. He also called the sealers ‘cigarette smoking, club wielding thugs’.

Those comments came out while the ship was parked in St. Pierre, a French island just south of Newfoundland. The fishermen there didn’t take kindly to those comments and came out to cut our ship adrift. The Gendarmarie watched as one of their citizens hacked our mooring lines off with an axe. We scrambled to get the engine started and left St. Pierre, minus our gangplank.

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This year I’m not getting involved much in the seal hunt issue. The European Union are about to enact a ban on all seal products. The sealers themselves have said that a ban would shut down their industry. This is very good news.

The seal hunt won’t be stopped with kind words or compassion towards the fishermen who wield clubs. History has shown that you have to make the hunt economically unfeasible with boycotts and bans. The hunt is already being subsidized by twice as much as it’s worth in sales. The Canadian government will be stubborn, but we’re much more numerous and stubborn ourselves.

Let me be clear about how I feel about the sealers that will be impacted by the hunt ending. I don’t care where you get your one or two thousand dollars of blood money every year. I don’t care if ten generations of your family have slaughtered seals. You can cry foul and accuse us of cultural prejudice all you like.

My compassion lies solely with the Harp Seal. When that community doesn’t have to deal with the ice being bloodied with their young every year then I will celebrate.