Seal Hunting Is Messy Business

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And so is protesting seal hunting. Less protesters showed up this year than previous years. But the protesters present tried to inhibit the legal slaughter of the Harp Seals by blocking hunting ships with tiny little row-boat sized zodiac dinghies- which could be deadly if the passengers fell in the water.

The hunters responded by dumping seal guts on the protesters and reporters. Somehow, the reporters are part of this story, rather than just standing off and reporting the facts from an objective point of view.

From the Canadian Press here:

Irritated hunters throw seal innards at protesters

CHARLOTTETOWN Protesters had to dodge flying seal guts pitched at them by angry hunters Saturday as tempers flared on the first day of Canada s East Coast seal slaughter.

News reporters and animal rights activists tried to get as close as permitted to the hunt on the Gulf of St. Lawrence, but their presence infuriated sealers as they hunted for scarce animals on small, drifting ice pans.

At one point, a sealing vessel charged up to a small Zodiac inflatable boat carrying reporters and protesters, and a sealer flung seal intestines into the midst of the observers.

Hunters in the Gulf typically use spiked clubs called hakapiks, but scarce ice conditions in southern areas have meant many are using rifles because they cannot get close enough to the seals.

There is still ice in northern areas of the Gulf, where hunters traditionally use hakapiks to crush the seals skulls.

Sealers in the Gulf of St. Lawrence can take 91,000 animals this year.

A second, much larger hunt off the northern coast of Newfoundland and Labrador will take place later in April. Hunters in that slaughter can kill 234,000 seals.

This story neglected to state why the animals were being hunted or culled. Is this a harvest? Are they culled to protect other animals? This story is intended to portray the hunters as angry and cruel people, and of course, the protesters were just observing- not trying to block the hunters or anything else that would interfere with the legal hunting of the animals, or would endanger the lives of the hunters or even the protesters.

The official Canadian Government report on the animals is available here, and it states that the population remains stable due to yearly harvesting of the animals.

The hunt is carried out by fishermen from areas that were devastated by the depletion of the Cod fisheries. The seals eat the cod, and the fishermen kill the seals. See this article:

The commercial hunt today is largely carried out by fishers in Newfoundland and Quebec (map).

Backers of the hunt say it brings vital income to coastal communities devastated by the collapse of the Atlantic cod fishery in the 1990s. Last year’s harvest of 320,000 harp seals generated about 16.5 million Canadian dollars.

This means that for each seal that is killed, a hunter gets about 51 dollars for the animal by selling the meat and skin. This seems like a fine way to keep the families affected by the Cod industry fed.

Protesters are claiming that global warming will cause a huge depletion of seals due to the lack of free-floating ice. This will just mean that there will be less seals killed next year. That is, if global warming is not just some kind of hoax.

Thanks go to the Jawa Report for the pointer to the article.