Environment : Canadians Hunt for Seals--and a Market : * The centuries-old trade was nearly ruined by anti-sealing activists 10 years ago. Now, a few hunters are trying to revive the shattered industry.

Nearly 10 years after the anti-sealing activists quit these shores in triumph, Newfoundland sealers like Garry Troake are trying to make something out of the wreckage of their centuries-old industry.

Troake, who started sealing off this postcard-picture island when he was just 14, says that what was a big win for the animal-rights movement was a disaster for him: He lost a third to half his annual income, and much of his sense of who he was. Amid rough-edged protests, the U.S. Congress banned the import of all seal products in 1972; the European Community outlawed the import of baby-seal pelts in 1983. And with that, the bottom dropped out of the market for seals.

But Troake has held onto his boat, and each spring, weather permitting, he still heads out into the ice-choked waters of Notre Dame Bay to hunt his old quarry.

Seal fur may not be worth much these days, but sealers such as Troake are hoping for eventual succor in seal-meat cuisine--anything from seal pot pies to breaded seal “McNuggets”--seal leather, seal upholstery, over-the-counter seal tonics, even seal-genitalia-based aphrodisiacs.

“We say, ‘Let’s go develop the market,’ ” says Troake. “What else am I going to do? I’m 31 years old. I’ve got grade 11, which is all (the schooling) they had here. I know how to do what I do good, but that’s it.”

The prospect of a Newfoundland sealing comeback doesn’t sit well with save-the-seals supporters.

“If they’re successful in resuming the seal hunt as it did exist, we’ll be right back at it, doing the same things we were doing 10 or 15 years ago,” promises Dan McDermott, national ocean ecology coordinator for Greenpeace Canada, who adds that although his group opposes all commercial sealing, what’s left of the Newfoundland industry is a low-priority concern for the time being.

Sealers swear that environmentalism is now their issue. At the height of the protests, they point out, animal-rights groups charged that Newfoundland’s seals were hovering on the brink of extinction, yet no official scientific agency ever placed the animals on its endangered list. And now that the seals are largely safe from human predators, the animals appear to be multiplying quickly enough to throw the ecosystem of this region seriously out of whack.

“Right now, in the ecological system of Newfoundland, there’s an imbalance,” maintains Troake.

Marine scientists say it’s impossible to tell just how many seals live in these waters. But they point out that the pups born in 1984, a year after the imposition of the European ban and the market collapse, are just entering their reproductive years, so a population boom is perfectly plausible. Canadian government seal-population modelers attempted an inventory of seal pups in 1990, but the numbers, bathing in the mystifications of politics, have not yet been released.

Art Pearce, a lobbyist with the Canadian Sealers Assn., estimates that there are about 4 million seals at large in the northwestern Atlantic. Some species have been reproducing so vigorously that rueful scientists now say a program of mass offshore inoculations with timed-release contraceptives will soon be necessary, just to bring things under control.

The shots would be administered with hardened gelatin “bullets” developed for use on farm animals in 1983. The novel birth-control would be costly and cumbersome, but politically more acceptable than the proposed alternative--a big “cull,” in which the overabundant, low-value seals would be killed and unceremoniously dumped at sea.

If the seal population is indeed booming, that could spell trouble for fish. Sealers--most of whom work as fishermen in the summer--say all those seals are gorging on the capelin, a smelt-like species that is the dietary mainstay of Newfoundland’s all-important cod. Cod stocks off the Newfoundland coast are in a baffling decline, and fishermen conclude that marauding seals are hogging the capelin and starving out the cod.

Not everybody has reached the same conclusion, however.

“No one has come up with a shred of evidence that cod stocks are impacted upon by harp seals,” says Greenpeace’s McDermott.

In the 1970s, the sealers of Newfoundland found themselves international pariahs. Environmental and animal-rights groups such as Greenpeace, the Fund for Animals and the International Fund for Animal Welfare made Newfoundland’s seals a cause celebre-- particularly the baby harp which is prized for its pure white fur. Whitecoats happen to be extraordinarily photogenic.

“If the seal had the face of a pig, there never would have been this big protest,” contends Pearce.

By contrast, the sealers in their big rubber boots and snowmobile suits looked like thugs. As the protests of the 1970s and early 1980s gathered force, they would appear again and again on television news shows and documentaries, striding across the ice floes and clubbing the dewy-eyed babies until the blood poured from their noses and mouths.

The sealers, backed by the Canadian government, tried to argue that clubbing newborn seals was no less humane than slaughtering cattle in an abattoir, but to no avail.

“They are massacred for the luxury fur and leather industry--or sometimes just to satisfy someone’s dark lust to kill,” railed the International Fund for Animal Welfare’s Brian Davies in a 1982 newsletter.

Magazines, television shows and fund-raising pitches also showed anti-sealing activists being arrested as they tried to spray-paint baby seals, in hopes of saving their lives by spoiling their furs for market. As it happens, the vast majority of Newfoundland’s ruined sealers weren’t killing the celebrated baby seals with the infamous clubs. Since mother seals usually give birth far offshore, the whitecoats were off-limits to all but a few hundred Newfoundlanders who would ship out for the season on huge, steel-hulled vessels that could safely navigate this coast’s winter ice.

Most Newfoundlanders, by contrast, work aboard small, family-owned boats and can’t stray far from land in the winter. They go after the seals that they find close to shore, shooting them with rifles. And these seals are almost always mature.

So rare is it to find whitecoats within range of shore that in Twillingate, when a freak, 1862 current washed big sheets of whelping ice into the harbor, seals and all, amazed townspeople took note of the Lord’s providence by having a bell cast in England for the village church.

Troake himself clubbed a whitecoat just once in his life, and says he didn’t warm to the experience. “Killing is killing, I guess, but when you hunt with a rifle it’s different,” he says.

In practical terms, it wouldn’t have mattered if Troake and his fellows had been going at the seals with feather pillows. When the market for whitecoats collapsed, no one wanted to have anything to do with seals of any sort.

“No one bothered to distinguish,” says Troake. “They took our hunt down too.”

Having paid the price for the offshore hunt for whitecoats, Newfoundland’s thousands of inshore sealers are less than keen on reviving the seal market solely for fur.

Seal meat shows the most promise, they say. Newfoundlanders have always delighted in traditional seal-flipper pie, and Pearce says that now, seal meat is beginning to reappear in the province’s supermarkets after a long absence when grocers refused to stock it for fear of attracting demonstrators.

“In 1985, there were virtually no seals sent to market,” he says. “This year, there will be approximately 60,000 seals taken, which is an indication that things are happening.”

And they will happen even faster, he predicts. At the Institute of Fisheries and Marine Technology, a technical school in St. John’s, food technicians are at work on a line of seal heat-and-serve entrees, aimed especially at working mothers with no time to cook. If marketing studies deem them successful, there will be breaded seal nuggets, microwaveable sweet-and-sour seal, seal barbecue, seal pot pie, and boil-in-the-bag seal stew.

Then there is blubber. The Canadian Sealers Assn. has heard that vitamin-store frequenters in the United States pay good money for capsules filled with certain fish oils; the oils, unlike most of the fat in the American diet, are reputed to have a prophylactic effect against heart disease. Seal blubber is also rich in these healthful oils, says Pearce, and the association is having studies done to see whether it could be encapsulated and marketed as successfully as fish oil.

Pearce also keeps little swatches of seal leather in his office and boasts that when the Newfoundland provincial legislature recently redecorated its assembly room, it upholstered the chairs in elegant sealskin. More tests are under way on the uses of seal leather, he says, but leather is dangerously similar to fur--a luxury product, vulnerable to the riptides of moral fashion--and consequently the Canadian Sealers Assn. is keeping its mouth shut about the findings.

“The (seal) industry is in a fragile, development stage right now,” says Pearce. One false step, one indication that the endearing mammals are dying for profit, could bring back the animal-rights groups with their video cameras and sophisticated direct-mail entreaties. “Any pressure from the animal-rights movement could stall what has taken 10 years to get this far,” he says.

Indeed. In Twillingate, Troake and the other dislocated sealers recently chipped in $300 apiece to form a co-op in hopes of promoting seal on their own. But so far, they have had little return on their investment.

“We’re doing experiments with (ground-up seal meat) for fox feed, for fox farms and mink ranches,” says Troake. “The fox farmers love it.”