Norway Bans the Killing of Baby Seals for 1 Year

Fisheries Minister Bjarne Moerk Eidem on Saturday announced that Norway is halting the killing of baby seals for one year in an attempt to calm international criticism.

“We have decided this is the reasonable thing to do,” he said on state television. Ministry spokesman Jon Lauritzen said the ban would save up to 3,000 baby seals from being killed when the cull begins in Arctic breeding grounds next month.

The ban does not extend to adult seals, 50,000 of which will be killed this season, he said.

Only Norway, Greenland and the Soviet Union still allow seal hunts. Oslo insists that it must cull seals to stop them from gobbling up fish stocks. The government said it will appoint an international commission to investigate whether the killing, carried out with ice picks, is humane.

A joint Swedish-British television documentary, “About Seals and Humans,” which screened in Sweden, Britain and Denmark recently, alleged that Norwegian hunters were killing baby seals in an inhumane way.

The gruesome portrayal of seal deaths caused outrage among viewers and prompted Sweden’s King Carl XVI Gustav to criticize Norway over the killing.

Lauritzen said the one-year ban had been called because of the seriousness of the documentary’s allegations, which were based on film taken by Odd F. Lindberg, a former Norwegian seal inspector, in 1987 and 1988.