Seal Hunt: It’s a New Killing Season

Once again, the blood is on the ice.

Two decades ago, images of the baby harp seal tugged at the world’s heartstrings. Fat, fluffy and fresh-faced, their big black eyes seemed the epitome of innocence peering from pillows of dewy white fur. Then came news pictures of their skulls crushed by clubs and their pelts yanked from bloody, and very small, carcasses.

Public outcry prompted the Canadian government to ban sales of the youngest pups and the U.S. and Europe to ban imported pelts. The market collapsed, and the yearly slaughter plummeted--from roughly 230,000 seals to as few as 20,000.

“The sense was, without markets, the hunt would die out over time,” says A. J. Cady, director of the International Fund for Animal Welfare.

But not here on Quebec’s Iles-de-la-Madeleine in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, or along the Atlantic coast of Newfoundland.

The Canadian government, alarmed by the economic impact of depleted fisheries on its Maritime provinces and under political pressure to support a troubled industry, is now backing sealers with temporary subsidies and even coast guard escorts to hard-to-reach ice floes.

Seals must be old enough to have a least some of their white fur turn dark--18 days or so--before they can be killed. But that restriction is barely more than a nod to animal rights groups.

The government, in fact, has been helping sealers build new markets for pelts in Asia and for seal meat at home. And for two years it has said that no more than 275,000--the highest number in 30 years--can be killed per season.

Environmentalists and animal rights groups, stunned by the reversal of one of their most resounding triumphs, again are rallying on behalf of the harp seal pups. But they have been unable to muster enough international outrage to counter strengthened local interests.

In communities where winter unemployment reaches nearly 40%, the moment when a pregnant seal pulls herself out of the inky water to give birth on the ice represents more than a perpetuation of a 23-million-year-old species. It offers hope: for immediate cash, for a new fishing season, for sustaining a way of life.

“People argue, ‘Why don’t they do something else?’ ” says Roger Simon, the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans area manager. “The question is, what else?”

It Starts With a Blow to the Head

The procedure for turning a young seal--say, a 3-week-old pup known as a ragged jacket--into $20 in the hunter’s pocket remains essentially unchanged. It works like this:

Crush the skull with a club to render the animal unconscious. Roll the pup onto its back. From the chin, slice downward with a razor-sharp knife, cutting the brachial arteries leading to the flippers. This way the animal will bleed to death very quickly. Then peel the fur, skin and blubber from the carcass, and cut off the flippers.

“If you have a really professional sealer,” says David M. Lavigne, an adjunct professor of zoology at the University of Guelph in Ontario, “some have been timed in 28 seconds.”

Ghislain Cyr hunts seals for a living. As the harbor at Cap-aux-Meules comes to life, he is sweeping the snow out of the open cockpit of his 34-foot fishing boat, the Lady Sophie.

When Cyr, 39, is working fast on the ice, the sweat seeping through to his fleece anorak, the job can be done, if not in 28 seconds, then in a few minutes.

Working as part of a team, one hunter stuns and then kills the animal and moves on to another pup. A second hunter slices off the pelt. A third collects the pelt and carcass and hauls them to a waiting boat. From one pup to the next to the next, they work their way across the ice.

“One day I did 240. Took the meat, pelts. Took the flippers off,” Cyr says. “It was a good day.”

“It’s like with farmers,” he says, dividing his year into seasons of rest and work. “When you arrive at spring, the first thing you do is seals. In mid-April, it’s crabs and herring. May and June, that’s lobster time. Late summer, it’s mackerel and halibut.”

There used to be cod, but the overfished waters off Newfoundland have been so depleted that the government banned the commercial catch in 1992. The ban bit deeply into livelihoods here.

Fishermen say the seal hunt is crucial because its revenues help pay for the licenses, insurance, fuel, bait, lines, hooks, nets and traps--a $10,000 investment needed to put a commercial fishing boat in the water each year.

“The seals help me a lot to put money in the boat and start again. It’s quick money. You work a couple of weeks. You can work 18 hours a day. Never stop. But at the end, you make some money. Maybe $3,000, $4,000, $5,000 if it goes pretty well.”

Cyr has tried other occupations. “I can do lots of things. Cabinet maker. Boat builder. Build houses. I always come back to the sea. It’s more than a choice. It’s a kind of life you can’t find anywhere else. When you’re born around the water, it’s just like a farmer and the spring. When the spring arrives, you want to go back to the sea. It’s freedom.”

Fishing is the primary source of income for the 14,000 residents of the atoll-like islands here. Cyr can count back eight generations of his family on the islands. His grandfather was a fisherman and sealer, a farmer and a carpenter. His father was a sealer too.

“I started out on the ice as soon as I could keep my rubber boots on,” he says. As their father hunted nearby, he and his brothers and sisters would mimic the seals’ awkward waddle. His daughter, 13-year-old Marie-Andree, and son, 11-year-old Simon-Pier, have seen him kill a few seals.

“The first time I killed a seal around my kids, I gave the heart to one and the liver to the other. We brought them home and we cooked them,” he says. “If you clean it properly and cook it properly, seal liver is tender and soft and tasty.”

In a good year, Cyr says his life at sea can net him $35,000. He has also used a pelt to line a car seat, there’s seal meat in his freezer and his Chesapeake Bay retriever gnaws on seal bones.

“A lot of people come here and say they are ecologists. They want to save the seals,” he says. “I say, ‘What about the people?’ ”

While Cyr and his fellow hunters say the seal hunt provides crucial income, Clive Southey, a fisheries economist at the University of Guelph, says the hunt’s economic contribution to the region is insignificant. When the government subsidies and other lesser factors are taken from the equation, he says, the hunt adds about 0.06% to Newfoundland’s income and provides no more than 120 full-time jobs in the province.

Turnaround Occurred in ’96

In 1971, 230,966 seals were killed, according to the International Fund for Animal Welfare, a conservationist group leading the effort to protect the seals. The so-called “harvest” fell sharply in 1983, when Europe’s Common Market banned the import of baby seal pelts. It reached a low of 19,035 in 1985 and then climbed slowly to no more than 67,500 a year over the next 10 years.

The turnaround began in 1996. The Grand Banks cod fishery had been closed for four years, the Canadian government offered $1.5 million in subsidies for seal meat and the Canadian Sealers Assn. aggressively sought expanded markets. Last year, 261,036 seals were killed.

The government estimates that, to keep the herd at 4.6 million, no more than 286,000 harp seals can be killed each year.

In the old days, it was the white coats--the youngest pups with the most valuable pelts--that drew the hunters. Now, government regulations force hunters to wait until seals have begun to molt, showing a few specks of black skin and fur.

Regulations also specify the size of sealers’ implements: The club, which resembles a baseball bat, and the “hakapik,” a curved iron spike and blunt hammer-like projection mounted on a wooden pole, that can crush the skull and hook the carcass in nearly one motion.

The pups, some less than a month old, most no more than 4 months, last year made up nearly 85% of the reported kill. Their pelts--often destined for clothing plants in Asia--can bring from $20 to $35, more than the mottled pelt of an adult harp seal.

Until recently, little emphasis was put on taking anything but the pelt; the carcass was left on the ice. Showing greater concern for their image, hunters--or their more polished representatives--are now more likely to stress maximum use of the seal, including meat for sausage, steaks and a Newfoundland favorite known as flipper pie.

Blubber is being processed into fatty-acid capsules that some scientists believe may reduce cholesterol and blood pressure. Include, too, sales of the adult seal penis, held by Chinese folk medicine to be an aphrodisiac when dried, powdered and mixed with alcohol.

For five years, Tina Fagan, executive director of the Canadian Sealers Assn. in Newfoundland, has been working to build a market for seal products in Canada and Asia. Sale of the products in the United States has been banned since 1972.

“Five years ago, all we had were fur coats,” she says. Now “we have prime cuts, we have burgers, very shortly we’ll have a salami and pepperoni in the marketplace.”

Seal oil capsules offer “very good success stories for arthritis, diabetic circulatory cramps,” she says. The association is also promoting protein capsules and powdered protein made from seal meat and gelatin made from the pelt.

But of last year’s 300,000-pound “harvest” here, Simon says, most carcasses were discarded, and only 10% to 15% were processed for meat. Of that small fraction of seal meat that was processed on the islands, 20% was sold for human consumption; the rest, the fisheries official says, went for feed on mink and fox farms--where animals are raised for pelts, which eventually become coats and hats.

Zoology professor Lavigne estimates that most of the fox and mink farmers were able to buy the meat at no more than 9 cents a pound. “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize there isn’t much of a market for 250,000 pounds of seal,” says Lavigne, who also heads the International Marine Mammal Assn., which is funded largely by the International Fund for Animal Welfare.

Tourists Reach Site by Helicopter

On the frozen Gulf of St. Lawrence, seal pups have sunk into “ice cradles,” the indentations their body heat melts into the surface as they settle in like furry blobs of Silly Putty.

One pup, perhaps 2 weeks old, sniffs the air, its black nostrils flaring slightly. It makes a quiet, high-pitched guttural noise. But it shows no fear.

About a dozen tourists, from as far as Florida and Los Angeles, have reached the ice by helicopter.

As pups roll over and flick their black whiskers, Alice Lepis of Studio City, a top official of the Los Angeles Department of Transportation, is enchanted.

“Now how in the world could anyone kill anything like that?” she asks.

Few adult seals can be seen. When they poke through cracks in the ice or clear-water holes, eyes, whiskers, dog-like snout and smooth, round skull appear. Females nurse the pups with milk so rich--as much as 40% fat--that the pups gain more than 4 pounds a day.

The herd gathers in late autumn and early winter in the frozen waters off Newfoundland and the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The females give birth in early March and, after several weeks, the juveniles join the herd, fending for themselves on a migration to arctic waters.

After two hours on the ice, Cady, a 32-year-old American, is ready to argue science and economics to save the seals; emotion works too.

The pups are lolling about, much as they were a year ago when he visited before the hunt. Two days later, he found a field of 50 to 100 carcasses.

“You could hear other pups crying in the distance,” says Cady, of the international fund’s seal campaign. “ . . . All I could really think was, ‘What senseless waste.’ ”

“I have tremendous respect for the people and traditions of the past, but times do change,” he says.

“We’ve got to accept that this hunt is inherently cruel and, most importantly, recognize it is not and hasn’t been a viable long-term industry for the people of Atlantic Canada. I don’t accept that it can be done humanely. I don’t accept it can be done sustainably.”

Cady oversees an organization worthy of a U.S. presidential campaign in style and detail, if not in scope. Its annual budget, says an aide, is about $14 million. The group owns a twin-engine airplane, which it uses for over-ice trips to locate the seals, a helicopter and, since one of its helicopters was vandalized on the Iles-de-la-Madeleine several years ago, a hangar on Prince Edward Island.

A camera crew Cady dispatched to the ice at the end of March says sealers set upon them as soon as they climbed from their helicopter, smearing blood on a video camera lens and striking the camera with weapons used on the seals, forcing them to retreat.

The group also has spent at least $10,000 to rent a sophisticated video camera used to record the hunt from the helicopter.

The resulting vido, released by the group Thursday, depicts several gruesome scenes: A pup calmly lifting its head to look up as a hunter approaches with hakapik in hand. The club coming down not once but three and four times, with long seconds elapsing between strikes while the animal writhes on the ice. Pups wriggling as they are dragged on the end of the hooks to waiting boats, where they are clubbed again.

Where the ice was once marked by the trails left by mothers waddling out of the water to nurse their pups, trails of blood now crisscross the surface.

It has been a difficult sealing season.

First, the mild winter delayed the ice from forming. When the gulf finally froze, much of the ice was slushy, making the young pups largely inaccessible to the hunters.

Eventually, large pans of firmly frozen ice carried the seals into a protected zone near Prince Edward Island. To boost the hunters’ opportunities, the Canadian government opened some of the zone to sealing and sent coast guard boats to lead the sealers through the ice.

Each year the conditions vary. Too much ice makes it difficult for the hunters to reach the seals by boat. Too little makes it difficult to approach the seals on foot; in that case, the hunters shoot them with rifles from boats. But with perhaps half the seals shot dying beneath the surface, twice as many may be killed as are captured.

“When they’re on the ice, it’s quite easy. It’s like cracking eggs in the morning,” Cyr says. “He doesn’t move. He doesn’t scare. When you arrive at the animals, slowly, with your club, they’re just lying there. And then they’re dead. Doink,” he says, his arms moving swiftly as though swinging a club. “Doink. Doink.”

Critics of the hunt say the reality is something else.

Video cameras have recorded sealers skinning live animals, their coats a blur of silvery fur and blood as they flop about the ice. Seals wounded by rifle shots, if captured, are brought aboard boats with hooks jammed into their mouths.

“The animals can die a long and tortured death,” Lavigne says.

Indeed, the cameras two years ago caught what critics say were 140 violations of Canada’s sealing regulations. Seven sealers were charged with 17 offenses.

“I won’t tell you these are the smartest people in the world, or the most honest people in the world,” says Simon, the regional fisheries official, acknowledging that violations occur. But, sitting in a chair covered with a silvery-blue seal pelt, he defends the government’s ability to monitor about 400 sealers with two inspectors at a time.

As for a report that the catch in 1997 was almost half a million seals, nearly twice the quota and more than twice the figure recorded by the government, he has a curt response: “It’s bull----.” For the total catch to have exceeded the quota so significantly, Simon says, sealer, inspectors, processors, “everyone would have to be crooked.”

For nearly 30 years, Cyr has been a witness to, or participant in, this abattoir on ice. He is eager to return. At dockside, he and his mates make their assignments, work on their boat, stock up for their time at sea.

“It’s great . . . to feel the adrenaline,” he says.

“Every year when I kill the first one, I say, ‘geez, it’s cute.’ It’s hard to do, but somebody has to. Any animal has got a life, but sometimes you have to take a life to live. Nothing is perfect. We’re not perfect. But we have to live the best we can.”