We approached some of the babies, but I was always sensitive about getting too close. In seeing these balls of fur, almost out of a toy store, it’s tempting to want to pet them. But I did my best to resist the impulse. A few of the baby seals put on a brave display as we approached, trying to assume the defensive posture of a much older seal. But most others barely reacted, though they must have been puzzled as they saw, for the first time, a creature other than a seal.
I gave the mothers an even wider berth, knowing that they’d probably witnessed men killing seals in years past. If I kept my eyes focused on an opening in the ice, I’d occasionally see a dozen adult seal heads pop up in unison. Then, just as quickly, they’d all vanish, in the most elegant synchronized swim I’d ever seen. Their wariness is well justified, since shooting with a firearm is now a primary method of killing for the sealers.
We spent three cold hours on the ice, walking around, taking photos, and filming. We wanted to document this experience and kindle people’s bond with wildlife and nature. The babies are born with thick white fur, and they drink up the fat-rich milk of their mothers for about twelve days. Then the mothers leave them, forever. For another two weeks, the babies still can’t swim, and they move by clumsily dragging themselves along the ice with their developing flippers. It is during this most vulnerable phase of their development—after their mothers have left but before they’re swimming proficiently—that the sealers come.
There could hardly be a more defenseless, unoffending animal on earth—a newborn marine creature still unable to swim, without legs to run away, and without maternal protection. There is something so obviously and grotesquely unfair about the killing. The men had ships, clubs, guns, and not an ounce of remorse and came charging like frenzied warriors into one of nature’s nurseries. Even sport hunters, in pursuing bears, deer, or other animals, usually abide by an unwritten rule not to shoot baby animals. No such code of honor here: killing the newborns is the whole point of it.
I am an equal defender of all animals, regardless of how they look, whether they are imposing and fierce or harmless and endearing. It is not the size of their eyes, or the richness of their fur, that drives my instinct to shield them from abuse. But there’s no denying that beautiful animals, especially babies, stir something in people, and not all animal abuse is equal in the eyes of the public. It’s not just explained by species or cultural preferences for certain animals, but also by the needlessness of the abuse and the perceived motives of the abusers. That’s partly why puppy mills elicit more of a reaction than the use of mice or rats in animal testing, or why dogfighting is more widely reviled than killing animals for food.
The beauty and vulnerability of these newborn seal pups, so defenseless against their slayers, was only the beginning of the case we had to make on their behalf. There was the sheer carelessness in the manner of execution, taking a scene that would be ugly and violent in the best case and adding an extra measure of viciousness and cruelty. Then there was the colossal wastefulness of the hunt, leaving hundreds of thousands of small carcasses behind after the skin was peeled off. Finally, there was the vanity that inspired the whole enterprise—all of this suffering and bloodshed for a product nobody needs.
Americans decided they didn’t need seal fur long ago. The United States banned the killing of seals in 1972 when President Richard Nixon signed the Marine Mammal Protection Act. So Americans can see Canada’s hunt not only as cruel and unnecessary, but also as beneath our own national standards. For me, one of the keys to animal advocacy is to identify existing moral and legal standards and then ask simply that they be applied in a consistent way. This appeal will carry you a long way in the case against the slaughter of seals, since if Americans were doing the killing, it would be a criminal offense.
They didn’t have a law in Canada banning the sale of seal skins, but it turned out that Canadians weren’t buying them either. That’s left the industry entirely dependent on foreign markets and under-cuts its own endless refrain that what they do to seals is nobody else’s business. When you ask another country to import a product, you have literally made the matter that country’s business and invited others to make judgments about all that went into it. They have based the whole enterprise on the willingness of foreign markets to accept seal skins, and still they’re shocked and insulted when, for moral reasons, those countries decline the offer. The sealers just want the rest of the world to pay up and shut up, to buy baby seal fur and keep their opinions to themselves. But that’s not how it works, and they cannot have it both ways.
The first blows in the seal hunt are struck in the area where I had been standing, near the Magdalen Islands. The ship’s captain pulls up to an ice floe, like a boat pulling into a dock, and sealers jump off—clubs in hand and knives sheathed on their hips. The seals try to scurry away as the men run toward them, and sometimes rise a few inches from the ground to deliver a desperate, futile little snarl. The men swing at them, striking them with sharp blows to the head with a device called a hakapik, which at the top has a blunt metal face on one side, and a curved ice pick on the other. Once the sealer has struck a pup one or more times, he chases after the others, methodically attacking one after another. After all the seals in sight have been bludgeoned, he often goes back and starts the skinning process. He either flays the seal on the ice, cutting the pup down the middle and peeling off the fur, or he does a half spin of the hakapik and then gaffs the seal’s throat before dragging the creature onto the boat. There, the fur is peeled off, and the carcass dumped in the water or hurled back onto the ice.
Often, the sealers do not deliver lethal blows. I’ve had to watch hours of seal bludgeoning, as recorded by HSUS staff who have braved the threats of sealers to document this horrific cruelty. The sealers are in a frenzy, running on the ice and trying to kill as many pups as possible before any can get away. Because the seals squirm around frantically, the blows that fall on them do not always land where intended. I’ve watched seals in a pool of red, gasping for air and trying to raise their heads out of the blood. In 2001, a team of veterinarians observed the hunt and then did postmortem examinations of the pups. Their report concluded that the seal hunt causes “considerable and unacceptable suffering,” noting that in 42 percent of cases, the seals did not exhibit evidence of cranial injury sufficient even to guarantee unconsciousness when the knife was applied. In other words, many may have been skinned alive. In 2007, HSUS escorted an international team of veterinary experts to the seal hunt. Their report noted a widespread disregard for the regulations by sealers and a failure to enforce the law by authorities, concluding that both clubbing and shooting seals is inherently inhumane and should be prohibited.
All of which explains why Canadian authorities work so hard to keep the HSUS camera crews as far away as possible, and why the sealers menace and bully anyone who gets too close. But those scenes were recorded, and the cries of the seals have been heard across the world. The response of citizens has been to demand that their governments have no part in this cruelty. And that’s exactly what’s been playing out. In 2009, HSUS helped convince the European Union to ban the import of any seal parts into any of its twenty-seven member nations. That’s far more consequential than the whitecoat ban of the 1970s, partly because the EU is so much larger now. Canada’s other NAFTA partner, Mexico, has also banned seal imports. And the Russian government, in a decision that surely got the attention of Canadian sealers, has banned its own baby seal hunt, which had claimed the lives of up to thirty-five thousand seals a year—described by Vladimir Putin himself as a “bloody business.”
All of this, combined with the long-standing prohibitions in place in the U.S. market, has left Canada with few options. In 2010, the allowable kill, known as their official quota, was 388,000 seals, but because of rock-bottom prices and surplus pelts piling up in warehouses, the sealers killed just a fifth of what they were allowed—some 66,509 pups. It was the same story the year before, and there is little prospect that
it’s going to turn around. And for all of their defiance, you won’t find anyone who calls this an industry with a future. Just try to imagine any investor of any type anywhere in the world putting a dime into the sealing industry.
As it is, there are only about fourteen thousand licensed sealers in the whole country. And even when the pelt values are highest, only about five thousand or six thousand actually participate in the hunt. Although it’s a commercial activity, for the guys who do it sealing offers a minor, off-season supplement to their regular income as fisherman. Sealing is tough on their boats because of all the heavy ice. And when you consider all the costs of fuel, repairs, and maintenance, you can understand why only one of every three licensees even bothers. When the furs drop in price, the whole thing turns from a source of extra income into a costly hobby.
If the free market alone were guiding events here, no one at all would head out to the ice floes for the killing. For Newfoundland sealers themselves, the industry generated about $1.2 million in gross revenues for 2010. That sounds like a good year only if you compare it with gross revenues in 2009, which came to less than $900,000. Over the last decade, pelt prices have gone down from $30 or $40 a skin to just $15 or $20 today—which includes both the fur and the oils extracted in the processing, which are used for commercial lubricants, animal feed, and omega-3 supplements. So on the financial plus side of the modern sealing industry, we’re looking at total gross receipts of about $1.2 million a year. To put these numbers in perspective, mining in Labrador is a $2.5 billion industry, and the harvest for fish and shellfish approached $450 million.
If those are the pluses, what’s the financial downside, apart from the operating costs borne by the sealers themselves? Well, for starters, there is the cost of deploying the Canadian Coast Guard for six or seven weeks, and these costs, of course, are borne by the taxpayers. It’s the Coast Guard that breaks the ice and allows sealers to get into the nurseries. This federal agency is also there to “monitor” the hunt, which in practice seems to mean hindering efforts by the press and others to document the slaughter, and to conduct search and rescue for the sealers themselves when they get into trouble in these ice-filled waters. All of this costs the people of Canada from $3 million to $5 million a year—so right there, the public costs are already three to five times the business revenues in recent years.
Along with assistance from the Coast Guard come tens of millions of dollars that sealers have received over the years in public subsidies, which take many forms. The government withholds a full accounting, but the ones we do know about are considerable. There are direct subsidies for seal products, grants and loans to processing plants, and investments in product marketing and development, so that all those skins have somewhere to go. And then there’s all that lobbying and diplomacy by Canadian government officials, who shuttle between Ottawa and the capitals of the world pleading the case of the sealing industry.
It adds up to millions upon millions of dollars every year in public money, all to preserve an industry with gross receipts of a million dollars and sometimes less. And when you factor in the sealers’ own individual costs, their actual profit is just a fraction of receipts. For every baby seal they club to death, they’re pocketing only a few bucks—if they clear any profit at all.
And this doesn’t even count the spreading economic toll of the international boycott of Canadian seafood—provoked entirely by the furor over the seal hunt. Canada exports more than $3.5 billion a year in seafood products, with two-thirds of that going to America. It’s hard to measure the precise economic impact of the boycott that HSUS launched in 2005, and which has now spread to Europe. But with thousands of food retailers, restaurants, and other food service providers having joined our campaign, there is no question that Canada’s seafood sales abroad have been reduced by tens of millions of dollars, if not hundreds of millions. Since the boycott started, the value of snow crab exports—which in 2004 accounted for half of all Newfoundland’s fish exports—has fallen by $900 million.
Any way you look at it, the hunt is a net loser for everyone involved, and above all for the fishing industry. Yet the hunt goes on year after year. And if it’s not economics that drives it onward, then what’s left but foolish pride and political pandering? The Atlantic provinces resemble what Americans call “swing states,” with all three major parties—the Liberals, Conservatives, and New Democratic Party—competing for votes. And though national polls invariably show that most Canadians would gladly be rid of the hunt, in this locale protecting the seal hunt is the only acceptable position.
Even with lucrative shell fisheries in Newfoundland now, the sealers cling to the hunt as a traditional way of life, and a rational analysis of the economic situation is wasted on them. It was overfishing that caused a decline in a number of stocks, but settled opinion holds the seals responsible. In reality, the seal issue is just a proxy for a whole assortment of misfortunes, frustrations, grievances, and resentments—all of which the political class is skilled at exploiting and reinforcing. So the subsidies flow, and the politicians keep their act going with loud scorn for the opinion of outsiders, calculating that local votes count for more than global disapproval.
Yet, at some point, the angry posturing will have to give way to common sense—to an honest accounting of seal hunting and of the gathering strength of the seafood boycott. As one Canadian writer has put it, the sealers and their political patrons “have as much chance of stemming this tide as Germany did of stopping the Allies after D-day. The battle is lost. But because of ideological fanaticism they keep fighting, secure in the delusion that the Canadian taxpayer, like the cod, is an inexhaustible resource that will forever fund this foolishness.”
As in other such clashes over the fate of animals, however, the sealers may find that what they now fear as a bitter defeat will actually bring a better day. The seal hunt is a relic of the old economy of North America, and a willful clinging to it is the surest way to remain stagnant and to shut off new opportunities. Times change, and so do people’s hearts. And these communities, including the sons and daughters of today’s sealers, may one day discover that the path to progress need not involve liquidating wildlife and destroying nature. More than ever, just the opposite is true. For every one customer who will buy a seal fur, there are at least a hundred people who would pay good money to witness the serene beauty of the nurseries of the North Atlantic. Seal watching and seal slaughter, however, can never go together. They are incompatible, both morally and economically. The people of Atlantic Canada, and ultimately all Canadians, must choose one or the other. The continued slaughter of seals is a shameful, sorrowful thing, and unworthy of an otherwise fine nation.
PART III
Building a Humane World
CHAPTER SEVEN
Cruelty and Its Defenders
MY CHILDHOOD HOME STOOD at the intersection of a busy street and a not-so-busy one—a place plenty dangerous enough for a dog off leash, and especially if no one’s looking out for him. I’ll always regret that as a family we didn’t dutifully abide by that rule. That’s how one summer day turned tragic for us when I was eight years old.
My first dog, half poodle and half beagle, was named by my older brother for the Athenian statesman Pericles. It was a big name to live up to and didn’t quite fit our little guy. Pericles was an always happy, go-along sort of dog, not an alpha male as the august name would suggest. It was no surprise, then, that one afternoon Pericles was out and about, tagging along behind another dog. The lead dog stepped into the busy street by our home, and Pericles, always the loyal soldier, fell in right behind him. The big dog made it across, but our little Pericles didn’t. A car hit him straight on, and he died there on the road.
My family shielded me from the details as they relayed the grim news about my best friend. I was devastated, perhaps because I was just old enough to grasp what had happened, but still too young to be prepared for such sorrow. I bawled for hours—sitting down with my back against t
he garage wall on our makeshift basketball court, head buried in my folded arms, chest heaving, and my shirtsleeves absorbing the tears. The feeling stayed for a long time.
I now know that grieving after losing a pet is not unusual. It would be odd to have any other reaction. We feel empathy and love for the dogs and cats with whom we share our lives. We treat them as members of our families, and that means dealing with all they bring into our lives—the good and the bad, including the inevitable loss that comes with their shorter life spans.
Even if their passing is not premature—through an accident or sudden illness—it is still wrenching and painful because we see their entire life cycle unfold. We gleefully watch their frolicking as puppies or kittens, see them mature into their prime, and then in a matter of years their bodies start to decline, and too soon they slow down and begin to fail. In many cases, we are ultimately confronted with an awful choice: we keep on loving them but watch them face the frailties of old age, or we consult with a veterinarian and decide to end their suffering.
That’s a moment we never forget. When I was a teenager, my parents and I stroked and gently whispered to Brandy, our Labrador mix, as the vet injected a solution into her veins. She trusted us to the end, but her plaintive eyes and pinned-down ears told me she knew that something serious and very different was happening. She could see it in our eyes, despite our vain efforts to pretend this was just another routine visit to the vet. After it was all over and we left the vet’s office, we silently got into the car. We took the longest ten-minute drive of our lives back to the house. When we got there, we felt emptiness—in the house and in our hearts. This little life, such a big presence in ours, was gone.
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