Sea of Slaughter

by Farley Mowat

  The pros and cons of the wolf’s reputation are complex. It must suffice to say here that the preponderance of independent scientific opinion agrees that the wolf serves a vital role in the well-being of its prey species; is no threat to human life; is responsible for only minute losses of domestic animals; and, for the most part, will not even live in proximity to human settlement and agricultural enterprises. We have doomed it to death, not for what it is, but for what we deliberately and mistakenly perceive it to be—the mythologized epitome of a savage killer, which is, in truth, the reflected image of ourself.

  A recent example of the systematic destruction of wolves, once again using the discredited argument that we are helping “more desirable” species to flourish, has been taking place in British Columbia, with the cabinet minister responsible for conservation leading a war of extermination.

  “These ‘beautiful animals’ may be pretty in a book, photo or a painting. They may be impressive in a zoo or in a contrived movie. In the bush under real conditions, they are one of the most dangerous, vicious, unrelenting killers in existence. Contrary to the Farley Mowatt [sic] version, they do not selectively kill. A pack of wolves will kill as many animals in a herd as they can, often tearing them open and leaving them to die slowly.”

  This condemnation of the wolf was made in November, 1983, by British Columbia’s Minister of Environment, Tony Brummett. Brummett’s electoral constituency includes the Peace River district in the northeastern corner of the province and embraces one of the last remaining areas of wilderness where the wolf has been able to maintain a foothold. The region centres on the town of Fort Nelson and is a paradise for big game and trophy-hunting sports, mainly from Japan, Germany, and the United States. The recreational pursuits of these wealthy ladies and gentlemen are of some financial benefit to Fort Nelson’s motels, restaurants, and retail stores and are extremely lucrative for the several local guiding and outfitting establishments.

  When, in mid-1983, Brummett (himself an avid hunter) was told that the ever-increasing flow of foreign sports was depleting the supply of game in the Peace River region, he was as disturbed as his constituents. Since it would have been politically inexpedient to reduce the level of human hunting, Brummett decided to eliminate man’s only significant natural competitor for moose, bighorn sheep, caribou, and other trophy animals. This course of action also had the added advantage of deflecting public awareness away from the real culprits. In short, the situation would be rectified by making the wolf culprit and target, not only in the flesh but in the mind.

  Brummett’s first move was to have his departmental biologists assemble the requisite “studies” to justify an indictment against the Peace River wolves. These government employees then took upon themselves the roles of judge and jury and, having found the wolf guilty as charged, recommended the death penalty. Brummett thereupon directed Dr. John Elliott of the department’s Fish and Wildlife Service, who was chief prosecutor against the wolf and also resident “wildlife manager” at Fort Nelson, to conduct the execution.

  For political reasons it was determined that no public announcement of the program would be made and that no more than $30,000 of taxpayers’ money would be committed to the cause. However, Elliott was not to be left short of funds. Arrangements were made by the British Columbia branch of the Canadian Wildlife Federation and the Northern B.C. Guides Association to provide additional funding to charter a helicopter with which Elliott could search out and destroy the wolf population of the North Peace region.

  A word about the Canadian Wildlife Federation is called for at this juncture. Formed in the 1960s by hunting and fishing groups to represent their special interests, it must under no circumstances be confused (although such confusion seems suspiciously easy) either with the Canadian Wildlife Service—a federal government agency—or the Canadian Nature Federation—an affiliation of conservation and environmentalist groups. In its solicitations for funds and public support, the CWF proclaims it is devoted to “enhancing wildlife populations.” What it does not explain is that this “enhancement” is, to a very considerable degree, intended to provide living targets to satisfy its sportsmen members.

  A packet of pretty stamps depicting flowers, butterflies, and songbirds, accompanying a solicitation for donations, which I recently received from the CWF, included this moving exhortation: “These stamps do a mighty job when you put one on every card, letter or package you send. They show a beautiful heritage we must all work together to protect. Use these stamps to remind others of the importance of wildlife, conservation and a healthy environment.”

  The British Columbia chapter’s assistance in Dr. Elliott’s wildlife “enhancement” program included collaboration with the Wyoming-based Foundation for North American Sheep, a kindred organization devoted to “enhancing” stocks of wild sheep for sporting purposes. Its president boasts that the foundation spent $800,000 in 1983, a “goodly portion” of which was used in Canada for wolf-killing, forest-burning, and other attempts to improve the prospects for sheep hunters. Some $200,000 of this went to support Dr. Elliott’s and Mr. Brummett’s wolf management program.

  The Canadian Wildlife Federation also arranged a 1,000-ticket raffle, at $100 a ticket, to raise additional funds for Elliott’s work. First prize in the raffle was a ten-day hunting safari to Zimbabwe, where the lucky winner would have the opportunity to shoot his fill of African animals.

  Initially all these proceedings were conducted in camera, as it were. But in early January, word of what was to be done with the profits from the raffle leaked out and the pot began to bubble. An inquisitive reporter then discovered not only what Brummett planned to do, but that Dr. Elliott was already hard at work.

  Sequestered at the ranch of one of the region’s wealthiest sportsmen, who was also a munificent benefactor of the governing Social Credit Party that Brummett represented, Elliott was in command of a strike force consisting of a helicopter supported by several fixed-wing aircraft. The latter, owned and flown by “volunteers,” fanned out over the wilderness, acting, as they merrily put it, like “air-borne hounds.” When one of them spotted a wolf family, he would radio Elliott, whose helicopter would then be flown to the target point. While the light planes herded the wolves to prevent them from escaping, Elliott hovered over them and blazed away with automatic weapons at point-blank range. When convenient, the corpses were recovered and their skins—worth from $75 to $100 each—given to the volunteers as rewards for services rendered. About thirty-five wolves had been killed by the time the story was uncovered.

  All hell broke loose as conservationists began to rally in protest. Elliott was summoned to Victoria, the provincial capital, where Brummett held a press conference. Calling the program a simple matter of “game management,” the minister confirmed that its aim was “to ‘enhance’ the numbers of animals for hunting.” He compared it to raising livestock. “In agriculture we try and produce more animals so we can butcher more.” Having then blandly claimed that his department was funding the entire program itself, he introduced Dr. Elliott. Simply and engagingly, Elliott explained that he was conducting a scientifically managed conservation program, whereby 80 per cent of the 500 wolves in the affected region would be “culled” in order to ensure the continuing good health of the big game population, and of the wolves themselves. Quoting facts and figures from his own studies, and others that reinforced his conclusions, Elliott seemed the epitome of the bright, young, dedicated scientist. Nevertheless, his “data base” was soon under assault as independent experts questioned both his methods and conclusions. The most devastating criticism was that no confirmation existed of Elliott’s estimate of 500 wolves, of which he intended to kill 80 per cent. It was pointed out that this was an impossibly high population figure and that if Elliott did, in fact, find and kill anything like 400 wolves, he would have succeeded in wiping out the entire wolf population of a vast region.

  Undaunted, Elliott
flew back to continue his “enhancement” program—while Brummett took a holiday in Jamaica, perhaps hoping that the heat at home would subside in his absence. It did not. Protests against the wolf slaughter spread across Canada and the United States and on to Europe. In an effort to damp down the uproar, Brummett’s department announced that, “for safety reasons,” the area where the “cull” was taking place would henceforth be closed to reporters. The public furore eventually began to abate for lack of information on what was happening, but the kill continued.

  Elliott was still engaged in his aerial war as late as April, by which time he had butchered 363 wolves. There is no reason to doubt that he had by then killed virtually all the wolves in the affected district.

  The Canadian Wildlife Federation has reason for satisfaction, knowing as it must that the British Columbia Fish and Wildlife Service also poisoned, shot, or trapped some 400 additional wolves in other parts of the province during the winter of 1983–84. These “management” operations, together with commercial trapping and sport hunting, probably destroyed at least 1,400 of the “most dangerous, vicious, unrelenting killers in existence.”

  In the spring of 1984, Yukon Territory—British Columbia’s neighbour to the north—began setting the stage for intensifying its own long-term program of “wolf management” by officially warning parents that the wolf threat had reached such proportions that children should not be allowed out after dark, even in the vicinity of the capital city of Whitehorse. Yukon wildlife scientists are now proposing to nullify this threat by a drastic escalation of their wolf control program. British Columbia’s eastern neighbour, the province of Alberta, is also moving in the same direction. In a January, 1984, interview, biologist John Gunson, head of Alberta’s Carnivore Management Unit, went on record as saying, “I don’t see anything wrong with wolf control to enhance big game hunting. Wolves don’t pay taxes, and people do... the problem is, if you want to take a great deal of big game, you have to do away with the wolves.”

  Alaska, too, has heard the same message. Biologists in that state have evolved a most sophisticated way to achieve “wolf management.” Wolves, usually only one from a pack, or family, are live-trapped in summer and fitted with radio transmitter collars. Come winter, airborne hunters “cull” wolves simply by homing in on radio signals that lead them directly to the Judas animal and enable them to destroy the entire family to which it belongs. And in Minnesota, the only state in the lower forty-eight with a viable, if relict, wolf population, state and federal authorities abetted by hunter organizations are clearing the way to an open season on what the commissioner of Minnesota’s Department of Natural Resources refers to as a “magnificent trophy animal.”

  As 1984 draws to a close, it is clear that a concerted effort is being made to apply a final solution to the “wolf problem” in those remaining regions where viable wolf populations still exist. There seems to be considerable likelihood that the attempt will be successful unless a massive protest can be mounted—one that will neutralize the unholy alliance of government game managers, self-serving politicos, and self-styled “conservation” organizations devoted to “enhancing” the supply of big game animals.

  Part III | Fish out of Water

  The familiar adage assures us that there are more fishes in the sea than ever came out of it. Indeed, there may have been a time when there was truth in this contention.

  Not any more.

  Ten years ago, Jacques Cousteau, speaking for those concerned about the future of the living seas, voiced his fear that about a third of the stuff of life in the world’s oceans had already been destroyed through man’s use of it, or his abuse of it. During the decade since, the situation has worsened. We are now facing the possibility that the seas may become virtual life-deserts in the not-far-distant future.

  Fishes and marine invertebrates rarely strike a sympathetic chord in the human breast. Nevertheless, they comprise one of the most important skeins in the intricate weave of planetary life. It is only at the risk of undermining our own chances for survival that we can ignore what we have done, and are doing, to the sea-dwellers.

  A second compelling reason for understanding the fate of the fishes has to do with truth-telling. During the past half-century, men who profit from the destruction of sea-life have been making increasingly vigorous efforts to escape the onus for laying waste the oceans, by blaming other animals. “Fish out of Water” puts the blame where it belongs, and describes something of the fate we have inflicted on marine animals in and about the Sea of Slaughter.

  11. King Cod and the Regal Salmon

  It is probably impossible for anyone now alive to comprehend the magnitude of fish life in the waters of the New World when the European invasion began. It may have been almost equally difficult for the early voyagers. According to the records they have left for us, they seem to have been overwhelmed by the glut of fishes.

  In 1497, John Cabot set the tone by describing the Grand Banks as so “swarming with fish [that they] could be taken not only with a net but in baskets let down [and weighted] with a stone.” On the lower St. Lawrence in 1535 Jacques Cartier reported that “This river... is the richest in every kind of fish that anyone remembers ever having seen or heard of; for from its mouth to its head you will find in their season the majority of the varieties of salt- and fresh-water fish... great numbers of mackerel, mullet, sea bass, tunnies, large eels... quantities of lampreys and salmon... [in the upper River] are many pike, trout, carp, bream and other fresh-water fish.”

  Captain John Smith was no less enthusiastic in extolling the fisheries of New England in 1614. “A little Boye might take of Cunners and Pinacks and such delicate fish at the ships sterne, more than six or ten men can eat in a daie; but with a casting Net, [he could take] thousands... Cod, Cuske, Halibut, Mackerell, Scate or such like, a man may take with a hooke and line what he will... no River where there is not plenty of Sturgeon or Salmon or both; all of which are to be had in abundance.”

  We round out the picture with a description of the Gulf of St. Lawrence about 1680: “Here also are seen prodigious quantities of all kinds of fish, Cod, Salmon, Herring, Trout, Bass, Mackerel, Flounder, Shad, Sturgeon, Pickerel, Oysters, Smelt, Skate, Whitefish...”

  This chapter deals with the essence of industrial exploitation of life in the seas—with the several species the great commercial fisheries of the northwestern Atlantic were founded on, and which are now, after suffering 500 hundred years of ever-escalating human greed, running out their time.

  Initially, cod was king; yet it was only the most valuable species in an entire group collectively known to those who catch them as groundfish. The story of what we have done to the groundfishes constitutes the first part of the chapter. The second deals with the baitfishes—small creatures that used to school in untold billions and upon which all the groundfishes and much other life in the seas ultimately depend. The chapter ends with an account of the destruction of one of the most celebrated of all North American fishes—the Atlantic salmon.

  Early voyagers to the northeastern approaches of America encountered two kinds of land. One was high and dry, and they called it the Main. The other lay submerged beneath 30 to 150 fathoms of green waters, and they called it the Banks. The waters of the continental shelf from Cape Cod to Newfoundland form an aqueous pasture of unparalleled size and fecundity—a three-dimensional one with a volume sufficient to inundate the entire North American continent to a depth of a yard or more. In 1500, the life forms inhabiting these waters had a sheer mass unmatched anywhere in the world. This was the realm where cod was king.

  The name Cabot used for Newfoundland in 1497 was Baccalaos, that being the one bestowed on it by Portuguese who had led the way. The word means, simply, land of cod. And Peter Martyr (from about 1516) tells us that “in the sea adjacent [to Newfoundland, Cabot] found so great a quantity... of great fish... called baccalaos... that at times they even stayed the passage o
f his ships.”

  The New World banks, and especially the Grand Banks lying to the eastward of Newfoundland, were a cod fisher’s version of the Promised Land. By 1575, more than 300 French, Portuguese, and English fishing vessels were reaping a rich harvest there. Members of Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s colonizing venture fairly babbled at the abundance of baccalieu. Cod, wrote one of the visitors, were present “in incredible abundance, whereby great gains grow to them that travel to these parts: the hook is no sooner thrown out but it is eft-soons drawn up with some goodly fish.” To which one of his companions added, “We were becalmed a small time during which we laid out hook and lines to take Cod, and drew in, in less than two hours, fish so large and in such abundance that for many days after we fed on no other provision.” A third summed it up: “Incredible quantity and no less variety of fishes in the seas [especially] Cod, which alone draweth many nations thither and is become the most famous fishing of the world.”

  Each new arrival on these fabulous fishing grounds found the same thing and had much the same reaction. When the Grace of Bristol sheltered at the island of St. Pierre in 1594, her people “laid the ship upon the lee, and in 2 houres space we tooke with our hooks 3 or 4 hundred great Cod for the provision of our ship.” Charles Leigh, reconnoitring the Magdalen Islands in 1597, noted “About this Island there is as great an abundance of cods as is any place to be found. In a little more than an houre we caught with hookes 250 of them.”

  At the turn of the sixteenth century, as many as 650 vessels were catching thousands of tons of cod in New World waters, using only baited hooks and handlines. As John Mason, an English fishing skipper working out of a Newfoundland shore station, noted, “Cods are so thick by the shore that we hardly have been able to row a boat through them. I have killed of them with a Pike... Three men going to Sea in a boat, with some on shore to dress and dry them, in 30 days will commonly kill between 25 and thirty thousand, worth with the oyle arising from [their livers], 100 or 200 Pounds.”