More than half of the thirty states with legal bear hunting allow hunting with hounds. The dogs may chase their quarry for miles, until the exhausted bear climbs a tree or turns to face a pack of frenzied hounds—either way dying a merciless death. The same method is used for lion hunting. Voters in Colorado, Massachusetts, Oregon, and Washington banned both baiting and hounding. But voters in Idaho, Maine, and Michigan rejected these restrictions, after the hunting lobby claimed that bear populations would increase dramatically if these methods were prohibited.
In Maine, hunters shoot four thousand bears every autumn, and nearly 80 percent of them kill the bears over bait. Four out of five of the hunters come from other states. It’s a lucrative business, with hunters paying $2,000 to $4,000 for the opportunity to kill a trophy bear. Ironically, when we helped to wage an unsuccessful 2004 campaign to prohibit killing bears over bait, the Maine hunting lobby attacked HSUS as an out-of-state group, arguing that it’s up to Mainers to decide these issues. Apparently, out-of-staters are welcome in Maine as long as they’re coming to bait, stalk, and kill the state’s wildlife. But if you’re there to question the whole sorry business of baiting bears—a practice forbidden in hunting most other animals—the message is just go back where you came from.
Hunters are never more resourceful than in thinking up new justifications for the things they do. They know that for nonhunters, killing for recreation alone, just for the fun of it all, is suspect. So they’re always quick to stress that they eat what they kill, and even elephant trophy hunters boast of distributing the meat to locals—presenting the kill as a kind of feed-the-villagers program. Another attempt at self-justification is the claim of hunters to control overpopulation of deer and elk. Yet in every state where natural predators like wolves, lions, coyotes, bears, bobcats, and lynx exist, hunters also target them. Add in the 89,710 coyotes, 395 bears, 373 mountain lions, and 1,883 bobcats killed by USDA’s Wildlife Services program in 2008 alone, and then the tens of thousands killed by ranchers, and you have hundreds of thousands of natural predators eliminated for no better reason than bloodlust from the hunters and contempt from the ranchers.
Then there’s the practice of shooting animals in fenced enclosures, known as captive or “canned” hunting. I’ve been to the Texas Hill Country, where many of the nation’s thousand or so captive exotic hunting operations are located, and visited a number of these places. Operators provide a price list of native and exotic species, and hunters shoot the animals in a “no kill, no pay” arrangement, with the outcome certain. Somehow this doesn’t offend the hunting lobby’s “sportsmanship” sensibilities. The Safari Club International even bestows “hunting achievement” awards and “Grand Slam” prizes on hunters who shoot animals trapped inside fences. In fact, one such hunting achievement award, “Introduced Trophy Game Animals of North America,” is designed to send customers ’a-runnin’ to these fenced-in hunting ranches. Handling the introduction are owners who, by means of fencing, baiting, or drugging, make it impossible to miss.
Captive shoots are a pure form of commercial hunting, with few of the usual lofty pretenses to necessity. The animal is private property, the killing is certain, and the hunter does not typically eat the meat. Many captive hunting operations have their own on-site taxidermy services—to minimize those empty days of “longing” before the trophy’s on your wall. And if the taxidermist does his job right, no one but he and the hunter will ever know that the animal was shot in the back at the foot of a fence—completing the whole contemptible farce.
Despite an unapologetic defense of these operations by powerful groups like the NRA and the Safari Club, many states have banned them, including Wyoming, which is hardly friendly territory to critics of hunting. Montana voters outlawed canned hunts in a November 2000 ballot measure, while states from Oregon to Tennessee have either banned or restricted the practice. Canned hunts continue in about two dozen states.
There are other captive shoots in the United States. At perhaps more than one thousand captive bird-shooting facilities, pheasants, quail, and mallard ducks are typically pen-reared and shot. You pay only for what you shoot—the birds are planted in the grass before the hunters arrive or are thrown from the top of tall structures in “tower shoots.” In Pennsylvania, “hunters” shoot live pigeons just for target practice, as if clay pigeons or skeet were not sufficient.
The trapping of animals for sport and fur is also inconsistent with the hunting lobby’s rhetoric. It’s a form of market hunting—a vestige of the nineteenth-century era of killing of animals for commercial sale of their parts. Like predators killed by hunters, trapped animals are not consumed for meat, and the states have no management plans, no population estimates, and no kill targets. Trappers kill millions of animals annually, and the intensity of the activity is driven largely by the value of the pelts. When bobcat pelts, for instance, are commanding high returns at fur auctions, there will be a surge in the killing of that species.
Leghold traps and snares are also indiscriminate, catching any animal that triggers the device. Add to that the fact that the animals languish in the traps for twenty-four to ninety-six hours (state policies vary on how often the trapper has to check the traps), and you get just a glimpse of the extreme suffering that the animals endure, with most trapping occurring in winter months when trapped animals often freeze to death. Thankfully, the public agrees that this cruelty is unacceptable and has approved HSUS-backed ballot measures in Arizona, California, Colorado, Massachusetts, and Washington to restrict the use of steel-jawed leghold traps and other body-gripping traps.
According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, only 12.5 million Americans went hunting in the United States in 2006. That is down from nearly twenty million hunters in 1975, with modest but measurable declines in hunting license sales just about every year since. Even so, hunters hold nearly all of the seats on state fish and wildlife boards—allowing policy decisions to be dominated by a small group determined to guard its privileges. Throughout the country, the system is stacked in favor of wildlife killing and against wildlife watching, even as eighty million Americans now watch wildlife every year. But while they’ve rigged the agencies, they can’t rig the demographics; the trends will soon overwhelm hunters, and they seem to know it.
A 1996 Massachusetts ballot initiative that restricted trapping also eliminated the requirement that five of seven members of the state Fisheries and Wildlife Board had to have purchased hunting licenses in each of the last five years, and that four of the seven members had to “represent hunting, trapping, and fishing interests.” It was a victory for the popular will that we need to see repeated elsewhere, so that wild animals are no longer parceled out as in some entitlement program for hunters. For too long, the management of wildlife has been left to a shrinking minority of sport hunters, who act as if wild animals have no conceivable value except as targets and trophies. But there is a public interest in protecting wildlife for better and more benevolent purposes, and it’s about time the public itself was heard from.
The Face of Innocence and the Shame of Canada
AS I PRIED MYSELF out of a small helicopter, it seemed like I was stepping onto another planet—frozen and barren yet wondrous and beautiful. Ice floes reached for miles, merging with the horizon. Small, rounded mounds of ice, built up by the snows and sculpted by the winds, were the only vertical features on a vast, level plain. Even with sunglasses, my eyes strained against the white light gleaming off the surface. There were no trees, no other vegetation, no evidence of any prior human visitors. In the foreground, though, there were seals—thousands of them, white-coated, wide-eyed, newly born, and nursing from the bellies of their silver-coated mothers.
It was March of 2008, and I had come to Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, to see one of the greatest wildlife spectacles in the world—the gathering of hundreds of thousands of seals in Canada’s Gulf of Saint Lawrence. In the winter, as many as six million seals migrate south from Greenland, swimmi
ng across the North Atlantic and down the jagged coasts of Quebec and Labrador to reach the immense sheets of ice that interlock with the landmass of Canada. The range of polar bears does not extend to this area, so seals see it as a safe place to bring their young into the world.
I had first come here more than fifteen years before at the invitation of my friend Brian Davies, the founder and then president of the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW). Brian had been a cruelty investigator in the 1960s with the New Brunswick SPCA, and in that capacity had been assigned to monitor the hunt. He was so disgusted by what he saw that a few years later he left the SPCA and founded IFAW as a campaigning organization almost singularly devoted to stopping the hunt—no small task, since it had been going on for at least two centuries. For Brian, the campaign would become his life’s work.
I was working at the time for the Fund for Animals and its president, Cleveland Amory, who in the 1970s had raised his powerful voice against the hunt. In 1979, the Fund purchased a ship, the Sea Shepherd, for marine-mammal campaigner Paul Watson, and he and his team took to the ice to spray paint the coats of the baby seals, rendering the pelts commercially worthless. In response, Canada’s government threw Paul and his crew in jail, roughing them up in the process. Brian admired Paul but not his tactics. He regarded them as a distraction from the more methodical campaign that he had organized and that seemed to be working.
After all, the annual toll taken by the sealers was in decline by the 1980s, especially after the European Union banned the import of fur from white-coated seals. The annual kills declined to as low as eighteen thousand, and the markets were disappearing. Most observers of the conflict assumed that time had passed the hunt by. They believed it would not survive long in the modern era—an assumption made a few times before. Even well before then, Newfoundland’s most prominent newspaperman had all but pronounced it dead. “A very colorful page has gone out of Newfoundland’s history,” said A. B. Perlin, editor of the St. John’s Daily News. “Seal fishery was a wasteful industry. It was, in many ways, an unpleasant industry. I’ve heard many a sealer talk about the small whitecoats, two or three days old, almost looking up with tears in their eyes as they killed them. And frankly it’s an industry that we could do without…and from the standpoint of humanitarianism alone, it’s probably a good industry to be without.”
That’s the way it looked again in the mid-1980s, like a dying industry. But Brian was not overly confident and invited me to the ice because he wanted the Fund as an ally in finishing the job. I was deeply moved by what I saw on that first trip, but I doubted that we at the Fund could add much to the campaign. We hated the seal kill, but we were still focused on America’s many wildlife problems, and the Fund just didn’t have much capacity in Canada.
For my part, I had no illusions that the seal hunters were about to give up. If there’s one lesson I’ve learned in animal protection, it is never to write an obituary for any form of animal abuse. The animals have only one life, but the abusers seem to have nine of them—and you never want to underestimate the pridefulness of sealers in particular, or of their friends in Ottawa. As it turned out, in the early 1990s, the sealers tinkered with their calendar, waiting for the babies’ coats to shed their pure white fur, revealing a silvery gray fur underneath, before they killed them. The sale of the silver fur from the slightly older baby seals would not violate the import ban on whitecoats, and the sealers could thus reclaim lost markets in Europe. They could also take advantage of newly emerging fur markets in China and Russia. In one respect, too, time was on their side: the global economy was humming, and suddenly the fur industry was on the rebound.
Canadian politicians, moreover, had devised a new strategy to blame seals for the government’s dreadful mismanagement of the cod fishery. Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO), which was supposed to safeguard the fishery for long-term sustainable yield, had ignored warnings from scientists and fishermen about overexploitation and placed virtually no limits on the industry. By 1990, the cod had finally reached the point of commercial extinction—at only 1 percent of their historic populations. In the annals of North American natural resources management, this was one of the most appalling breakdowns ever—and it was directed by the same people who had overseen the killing of the seals. By 1992, overfishing had inflicted so severe a population decline that the Canadian government declared a moratorium on cod fishing, taking away jobs in every province of Atlantic Canada.
Political leaders in Ottawa and in Newfoundland needed scapegoats, and seals were the easy targets. Politicians cited the presence of the few million seals off Canada as evidence enough that these creatures, and not the thousands of industrial fishing crews, had decimated the cod. Harp seals do eat cod, but the species makes up just 1 to 3 percent of seals’ diets. Moreover, because seals also eat predators of cod, they might actually have a net positive impact on cod populations.
Of course, neither the bureaucrats nor the politicians mentioned these facts. In 1998, John Efford, minister of fisheries and aquaculture for Newfoundland and Labrador, told the provincial legislature: “Mr. Speaker, I would like to see the six million seals, or whatever number is out there, killed and sold, or destroyed and burned. I do not care what happens to them…the more they kill the better. I will love it.” Lawrence O’Brien, a former member of parliament from Labrador, told the House of Commons in 2003, “It is not study that we want…. We want those seals taken out. I do not care how they are taken out. Every bloody one of them can be killed. I will go in there myself with a rifle and help shoot them.” It wasn’t exactly the voice of reason. But such talk was the closest thing to it among Canadian politicians blaming the seals for their own failures of foresight and management.
I see this attitude all the time among the adversaries of HSUS and its mission—the same habit of excuse making and angry, vengeful blame shifting. I saw it with the bison and wolves, and here it was playing out with the seals. If you strained hard enough, you could come up with a plausible-sounding theory to ascribe all of maritime Canada’s troubles to the seals, but if you go by common sense, all of this was plainly a con job. And in Canada, they somehow pulled it off every year. Summoning the same indignation over the same phony claims and numbers, they did it again in 2003, when the national government ramped up its seal quotas. Officials announced that they’d allow the killing of a million seals over three years—more than three hundred thousand a year.
Just a year later, Dr. John Grandy, HSUS’s longtime senior vice president of wildlife programs, came to me in my new role as CEO and made an impassioned plea that HSUS should gather its forces to oppose the hunt. Images of my 1993 visit to the ice came to mind. Cleveland Amory had passed away in 1998, and Brian Davies had left IFAW. John Grandy recommended that we hire Rebecca Aldworth, who had been one of IFAW’s top seal campaigners, and put her in the forefront of a revitalized, global campaign to counter a hunt that was now bigger and bloodier than ever. I knew it would be a very difficult battle, but also that we couldn’t allow a wildlife massacre of this magnitude to unfold just a few hundred miles to the north of us without a fierce counter-response. If sealers were going to declare war on the pups, then we were going to declare war on the hunt. It was now our fight, and we’ve been waging it ever since. And for me, it was time to go back up to the ice.
Spring was around the corner, but it was a long bend. Winter still had a tight grip on this part of the world. We flew out in two helicopters to begin our annual Seal Watch program. It was March 2008, and the hunt was still three weeks away. We were there, along with our camera crew and some journalists, to provide the “before” picture—a glimpse of the grandeur of this open-air nursery before the arrival of men with clubs and skinning knives.
Though there’s considerable local support for the hunt, there is global opposition to its savagery. Since the pelts are sold around the world, the goal was to choke off those markets and render the hunt unprofitable. Rebecca Aldworth was with me on
this trip, and the seals have no more capable advocate than her. She is not only incredibly articulate and knowledgeable about every facet of the hunt, she’s also a native of a small town in Newfoundland, in the heart of sealing country, and not easily written off as someone who does not understand local traditions. Also with us was Nigel Barker, the handsome young television personality who is also a world-class photographer whom we had brought to record the scene and to help tell the world about it.
About forty minutes into our helicopter flight from Charlottetown, we began to see small specks on the ice. There they were—newborn seal pups bunched together in loosely knit herds. Even though I’d seen them before, the sight transfixed me. We pressed ahead, and then saw thousands more. We were witnessing the terminus of the biggest annual mass movement of wildlife in the world, bigger even than the storied migrations of wildebeest, zebra, Cape buffalo, and other animals every year across the Serengeti.
Rebecca surveyed the concentration of seals below and signaled to the pilot that this was a good place to land. He moved us closer to the ocean and set down the helicopter’s floats on what we hoped was a thick patch of ice. We cautiously stepped out and felt sturdy ice beneath our feet and then the frigid winds on our face. We were dressed in survival suits, which provided a layer of defense against the biting air and against the water in case we fell through. It was below zero, and the windchill made it seem even colder. But the sun was shining, and, amazingly enough, the seals seemed unfazed by the conditions. Many mothers were still with their babies, and most simply stood their ground as they saw us, while a few fled to openings in the ice and slid into the water. The mothers typically venture off to feed and then return to nurse the pups. There were streaks of blood on the ice, but not because any seals had been killed already this year. This was placental material, still fresh and not yet covered up by the snows, and a marker of new life.
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