Sealers and Eco-Tourists Draw Battle Line in Ice : Canada has eased restrictions on seal hunting, which could jeopardize both pups and tourism.

It is blissful here on the frozen ice floes in the gulf of the St. Lawrence River, where we have come to watch the annual March harp seal birthing.

All around us are fluffy white pups with black button eyes, happily nursing against their gray blubbery mothers, sleeping peacefully in little ice indentations, even wriggling up to nuzzle our outstretched fingers.

In the Iles de la Madeleine--also known as the Magdalen Islands--of Quebec Province, once prime seal-hunting grounds, tourists armed with cameras have largely replaced hunters with clubs. Seal-watching tours started up about five years ago, with the blessing of conservationists, who hoped that the islanders would see that live seals brought bigger profits than dead ones, and that tourism was the best hope for the future.

But both the seal watches and the pups are in jeopardy as new Canadian regulations make seal hunting not only easier but encouraged.

Blaming a supposed explosion in the seal population for drastic drops in North Atlantic cod fish stocks, federal fisheries minister John Crosbie earlier this month reduced requirements for seal hunting licenses, called for the killing of some 500,000 seals, and said the government would initiate measures to develop new seal products and markets for those products. The government says the harp seal population has surged to 3.3 million from 2 million in 1983.

Conservationists say the crisis in the $700-million-a-year northern cod industry is due not to hungry seals--who, they say, rarely eat cod--but to overfishing by Canadian and foreign vessels. Spokesmen for the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) also dispute the seal population growth figures, saying that the population has remained constant.

Large-scale seal hunting virtually ended a decade ago after environmental groups focused world attention on the clubbing of baby seals on pack ice in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, causing the market for seal pelts in Europe and the United States to dry up. Both the United States and European Community ban importation of “whitecoat” baby sealskins.

Responding to the outcry, Canada outlawed large-scale commercial hunting of seal pups in 1987 and stopped issuing new sealing licenses--but continued to permit small-scale subsistance sealing by fishermen who already had licenses. Although the current legal annual limit is 185,000 seals, because of the lack of markets fewer than 6,000 were killed last year, mainly for their meat.

Under the revised regulations, new seal hunting licenses are being issued to licensed fisherman for the first time in five years. The new regulations, however, do not permit the resumption of large scale commercial sealing.

During the annual March birthing season, when some 600,000 pups are born on the St. Lawrence River ice floes, several tour operators bring groups for five- or six-day stays on Grindstone Island, the largest of the Magdalen Islands, about a 45-minute flight north from Halifax. (Some groups are based on Prince Edward Island, about 75 miles south of the Magdalens.)

Typically, tourists pay about $1,800 to be outfitted in thermal survival suits and insulated boots and taken by helicopters to the frozen birthing grounds. There they spend several hours with the seal colonies, petting and photographing the snowy white pups, watching them nurse and staying out of the way of protective mothers. Extra visits to the ice run about $250 apiece.

If the seal hunt comes back big-time, the seal-watching trips could end.

“Our trips bring in about $800,000 each March to the Magdalens, and I want to continue bringing tourists but I am not willing to co-exist with large-scale hunting,” said Ben Bressler, who runs Natural Habitat Wildlife Adventures of Sussex, N.J., the largest U.S. seal-watching operator. The company has brought some 2,000 visitors to the Magdalens since 1988, when it began tours under the auspices of the IFAW. The fund’s founder, Brian Davies, first launched the Save the Seals campaign in 1967.

Some islanders have suggested that compromise is possible, whereby tourists could go by helicopter to the furthest colonies and hunters could have access to the closest herds, which they pursue on foot, in snowmobiles and--when the ice is thick enough--in trucks.

However, asked to imagine a scenario where tourists and hunters shared the same hotels and where tourist guides also guided hunters--albeit to different sections of ice--Bressler said: “We’re committed to this season, but I don’t see us continuing if that would happen next year. (Then) they can’t have our $800,000.”

A spokesman for IFAW, John Thorp, said that if the seal kill skyrocketed, the fund would “consider pulling out our assistant to tourism development in the Magdalen Islands.” He hinted that IFAW might take even stronger actions--possibly encouraging a boycott of Canadian fishing products. Such a boycott against Canada occurred in Europe in 1983--before this country banned commercial hunting of seal pups--wreaking havoc on Canadian fishing concerns. Fishing companies here have not publicly endorsed the government’s new seal-kill measures, partly out of fear of a new boycott.

Many tourists on this month’s seal-watching tours, meanwhile, were appalled when they heard of the new measures.

“The possibility these islanders might go out and kill those animals has totally turned me off to this place,” said Myrna Abrams, a visitor from Chicago, as she suited up for a trip to the ice during a Natural Habitat seal tour earlier this month. “It makes me sick; I’d never come back if that happened, and I’d tell all my friends to stay away,” said Abrams, who was one of 63 participants in the first tour of the season.

“I think it’s ridiculous to blame the seals for eating the fish,” said Esther Swartz, an 80-year-old Philadelphian who watched the pups from the warmth of her helicopter seat. “If we leave nature be, it takes care of itself. Man causes all the problems; there’s enough fish in that ocean for everybody, seals and people.”

Many islanders are painfully divided in their loyalties.

“I don’t want to see the killing start again, but these are hard times and there must be a way to operate without being one against the other, something that’s a balance between hunters and lookers,” said Robert Gaudet, 52, a lifelong Magdalen Islander who hunted seals before conservationists changed his mind nearly 25 years ago. He now works with Natural Habitat tours each seal watching season, and runs an excavation firm the rest of the year.

In the early days of Brian Davies’ Save the Seals campaign, Gaudet, who helped haul and fuel Davies’ helicopters, sometimes had to physically defend the activist against angry hunters.

Gaudet said that although he personally has come to “respect the seals” and would never hunt again, he believes most Magdalen Islanders would pick hunting over tourism if they could vote, but would like both.

“The sealers don’t really get much money from tourism, and they can’t really kill enough to make money either since there’s not much demand,” he said. “They have to look out for themselves, and many will take whatever they can get to make as much money as possible.”

Gaston Lapierre, 39, a former hunter and now a seal-watching guide, said he’s making a much better living from tourism than hunting. “I like working with people explaining the life of seals,” said Lapierre, who runs the parts department of the island’s Crysler dealership the rest of the year. “I wouldn’t kill a pup again. Seeing them on the ice with their mothers changes you.”

Scientists aren’t so sure. “This is purely an economic issue to most of these people,” said Kit Kovacs, a leading Canadian authority on seals who spends each March studying the harp seals on the ice, and often lectures to seal-watching groups. “If the government succeeds in its stated attempt to develop new markets, people will hunt,” she said. “Folks have fairly firm images of how they’re going to deal with unhuman animals. We’re dealing with people who harvest animals as a livelihood, be they fish or seals.”

Kovacs said the government’s liberalized hunting policy has come at a particularly ominous time for the seals. This year the whelping grounds (the frozen ice floes where the seals give birth and nurse their young) are only about 11 miles offshore and reportedly are floating even closer--making the seals accessible to hunters.

“If we have double the number of hunters out there this year, with the whelping grounds so close, the seals will be sitting ducks,” she said.