by Farley Mowat
Only on Sable, a hundred miles out to sea, has a horsehead colony been permitted to bear and rear its young in relative security. Relative, because even this remote site is disrupted at whelping time by government biologists who for many years branded all the pups they could catch and are still tagging them. Mortality amongst the pups from shock, infection, or due to abandonment by their mothers has been high; but this is not all the Sable colony has had to endure. Additional pups and adults are regularly killed to provide scientific specimens. Up to the spring of 1984, 865 horseheads had been “taken” for scientific purposes.
The Sable colony is permitted to survive partly because it serves as a research laboratory where scientists can accumulate data for the publications upon which their fames and fortunes largely depend. However, the island also happens to loom large in the public eye because of finds of natural gas in its vicinity and because of its famous herd of wild horses. The kind of secret butchery visited on the other horsehead rookeries could not easily be concealed on Sable and would be sure to provoke a furious outcry from conservationists. Still, such a prospect may not be of great moment to the Fisheries and Oceans potentates who have now authorized a “controlled cull” of the horseheads on the island at some as yet unspecified date, presumably at a time when public attention is directed elsewhere.
The rationale for this projected action is that the seal population on Sable is increasing. No recognition is made of the fact that the increase is more apparent than real, resulting in part at least from the arrival on Sable’s beaches of many adults that have been forced to abandon their mainland rookeries under pain of death.
“Controlled cull” is surely one of the most abhorrent of the newspeak phrases devised by “wildlife and resource managers” in order to conceal the true intentions of their political and commercial masters. As applied to the horsehead, it is a revoltingly cynical deception, since it actually means an uncontrolled slaughter directed to the effective extirpation of the species in Canadian waters. A perusal of Fisheries and Oceans’ own internal statistics makes this grimly clear. Since the beginning of the “controlled cull” in 1967, I calculate that at least 90 per cent of all horsehead pups known to have been born outside of Sable have been butchered by the quaintly named Conservation and Protection Branch. Between 1967 and 1983, more than 16,000 pups and 4,000 associated adults were admittedly destroyed in raids on the rookeries.
The reality behind the deception is so atrocious as to challenge credulity. How could an agency of a civilized government engage in such a blatant attempt at biocide? What good or useful purpose could it possibly serve?
When I asked the Department of Fisheries and Oceans for an explanation, the essence of the reply contained this chilling statement couched in the new jargon: “Seals inhibit the maximization of fisheries growth potential, adversely affecting rational harvesting of these natural resources and the maximization of a healthy economy. Such negative-flow factors must be dealt with by scientifically validated management programmes such as the one we are engaged in.”
In support of what amounts to a writ of execution, three specific charges are laid against the horsehead by Fisheries and Oceans. First: they are extremely destructive of the gear and catches of inshore fishermen. Second: they eat tremendous quantities of fishes that would otherwise be harvested by commercial fishermen. Third: they spread a parasite known as the cod-worm, which reduces the retail value of cod fillets and imposes a heavy burden on the fishing industry. Not only are all these charges specious in the extreme, they are for the most part patently untrue. Let us examine them one by one.
Fishing is and always has been a risk enterprise. Fishermen expect to lose gear and calculate accordingly. However, the actual damage done to catches and gear by all species of seals in Canadian Atlantic waters amounts to less than 1 per cent of losses sustained from storms, passing ships, malicious damage, sharks, even jellyfish that clog nets so that they are swept away by powerful tidal streams.
On the basis of data that are themselves suspect, the department asserts that horseheads consume 50,000 metric tonnes (1980 figures) of valuable fishes every year, or 10 per cent of the half-a-million tonnes taken by Canadian east-coast fishermen. Analysis of this charge demonstrates that less than 20,000 tonnes of the consumption attributed to horseheads (but by no means proven) is of species of even marginal commercial value. Furthermore, the presumed tonnage represents live weight—the weight of the whole fish—while the figure for the commercial catch is based on processed weight—only that portion of the fish that is packaged for sale. The live weight taken by Canadian commercial fishermen in 1980 was approximately 1.2 million tonnes. The percentage of commercially valuable fish eaten by the seals can therefore be no more than 1.6 per cent.
Statistics are sometimes designed to lie, and that these figures from Fisheries and Oceans were so designed is established by a statement that Dr. Arthur Mansfield and Brian Beck, senior marine biologists with the department, published in the Technical Report of the Fisheries Research Board of Canada. “The [available] data suggests that the two largest commercial fisheries, those for herring and cod, suffer little competition from the grey seal.”
The final charge has to do with the fact that the life of the threadlike cod-worm is lived partly in the digestive tracts of seals (and some other animals) and partly in the muscular tissue of cod. The worm itself does not present a health problem to man. It does pose a cosmetic problem, but one with which fish-plant owners have long known how to deal. Operators inspect the cod fillets using a process similar to candling eggs and remove the worms.
Just how heavy an economic burden this imposes on the $2-billion Canadian fishing industry can be judged from the fact that, in 1978, the thirty major east-coast plants employed a grand total of sixty-five people, mostly women and mostly part-time, to deal with the cod-worm problem. I might add that these sixty-five jobs were, and remain, desperately needed in the chronically underemployed eastern provinces of Canada.
Nor is this all. The prestigious Marine Mammal Committee of the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea, meeting in Denmark in 1979, considered all available evidence on the cod-worm problem and concluded: “We are unable to say whether a reduction in the [cod-worm] infection of cod would result from a reduction in seal numbers.”
Fisheries and Oceans directs much the same set of charges against the harp, hood, and dotar seals. However, the latter can no longer pose any conceivable threat to the well-being of the Canadian economy. Between 1926 and 1954, the dotar population was reduced by the bounty hunt from an estimated 200,000 to less than 30,000. Not content with even this massive destruction, Fisheries doubled the bounty, with the result that, by 1976, according to government biologists, fewer than 12,700 dotars still survived in eastern Canadian waters. Most of these held to their precarious existence on lonely stretches of coast uninhabited by men who either fished—or voted.
In 1976, after a half century of “management,” the federal authorities decided that the destruction of the species had been effectively achieved and that the bounty no longer served any physical or political purpose, since hardly anyone was bothering to hunt the few remaining and now very wary dotars. However, by a stunning coincidence, they simultaneously concluded that the “controlled cull” of horseheads was not depleting that species fast enough; so, instead of being cancelled, the bounty was switched from the one species to the other.
This switch provided no chance of recuperation for the dotars since most bounty-paying officials could not tell the difference between the jawbone of a young horsehead and an adult dotar. Furthermore, the new bounty had been enriched to $25. Such largesse brought the hunters back out in droves to take part in a revived and general slaughter of both species.
The jaws of 584 horseheads and an unreported number of dotars were turned in for bounty during 1976; but this figure represents as little as a fifth of the actual kill. As
the mandarins of Fisheries and Oceans are fully aware, one of the advantages of employing the bounty system against seals is that, for every one shot and recovered, several more sink to the bottom dead or later die of wounds. In July 1976, department employees interviewed eighteen fishermen who reported that of 111 seals shot at and presumed wounded or killed, only 13 per cent were recovered. These deaths do not, of course, appear in the official statistics; but it is obvious that the bounty paid in 1976 represented the destruction of at least 1,500 and perhaps as many as 2,000 horseheads.
Although the bounty-engendered kill increased in each of the years 1977 and 1978, this was not enough to satisfy the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans. In 1979 the bounty was doubled, to $50 for each adult seal. To whet the appetites of hunters even more, an additional $10 was paid if the seal had been branded and a further $50 if the corpse bore a tag. In that year, more than 3,000 horseheads were slaughtered in what had become a perverse lottery of death.
If the hunters were to be selected as expert and responsible marksmen, the carnage might not be quite so appalling, but they are not. Although the department piously insists that only “bona fide fishermen who have suffered financial loss from seals” are permitted to shoot them, the truth is that any resident of the Maritime Provinces old enough to carry a gun can be a bounty hunter. Any Nova Scotian, for example, need only buy a non-commercial fishing permit, for $5, in order to validate an additional $1 permit to carry and use a rifle for seal hunting throughout the year. Hundreds do this, hunting for pleasure as well as profit. They shoot every seal they find, of whatever species, for the sport of it—and on the chance that it may be a horsehead. Since they are empowered to use rifles even during the closed seasons for other game, they take advantage of the opportunity to practise their skills on dolphins, whales, eider ducks, and even—I have seen this myself—on tuna.
In 1979, I tried to persuade Fisheries and Oceans to withdraw the bounty, citing some of the abuses connected with it. I was told the matter was under review. The following year I submitted a detailed report of demonstrable biocide against the seals to the man responsible for it—the Honourable Roméo LeBlanc, Minister of Fisheries and Oceans. Four months later, he replied to the effect that both he and his scientific advisers were satisfied there was no cause for concern. He concluded his letter with this remarkable statement: “Our policy is to build the stocks of harvestable fish and marine mammals to levels which will permit regular but controlled catches by Canadians while ensuring the well-being of these valuable resources. It has never been the Department’s intent to do otherwise.”
The cumulative destruction resulting from payment of blood money to hunters, begun in 1976, together with the “cull” at the rookeries, has now resulted in the deaths of at least 50,000 horseheads (and some thousands of dotars). It is somewhat difficult to comprehend how the “well-being” of these particular “valuable resources” is being ensured.
At the annual meeting of the International Convention on Trade in Endangered Species held in Europe in the spring of 1981, the spokesman for France pointed out that both grey and harbour seals were in trouble, world-over. He proposed that they both be listed in Appendix II of the Convention, which is designed “to avoid utilization incompatible with the survival of a species.”
Canada refused to support the resolution.
This was at least consistent. Canada had long since refused to join the United States, which extended full protection to both dotars and horseheads as early as 1972. Now LeBlanc chose to implement the 1981 recommendations of the Canadian Atlantic Fisheries Scientific Advisory Committee. This ponderously named group has as its chief though undeclared raison d’être the furthering of government policies. Its proposal was: “As a short term strategy, aimed at either stabilizing or further reducing the grey seal population, between 8,000 and 10,000 animals [should] be killed for [each of] the next two years.”
Fisheries and Oceans made every effort to carry out this recommendation. Yet, although 1,846 horseheads were “culled” at the rookeries in 1982, and the record number of 2,690 (1,627 pups and 927 adult females) in 1983, the target remained elusive. The truth was there were not that many grey seals in existence in mainland coastal waters. Had the “cull” been extended to Sable, that last refuge of the horseheads, the committee’s goal might more nearly have been achieved.
There is no doubt that it was the intention of Mr. LeBlanc’s department to visit the Conservation and Protection death squads on Sable’s rookeries. But, considering the problems Fisheries and Oceans was then having in defending the “cull” of harp and hood seals in the face of mounting international protest (a matter dealt with in the following chapters), discretion as to the slaughter of seals on Sable was accounted the better part of valour—for the moment anyway.
Since 1981, I have been conducting annual assessments of dotar and horsehead populations in representative parts of eastern Canada. Places I am unable to visit in person are surveyed for me by competent naturalists. What follows is a representative sampling.
During visits to the Grand Barachois on the island of Miquelon reaching back to the late 1950s, I have seen as many as 300 horseheads and dotars, mostly the former, gathered together during their mid-summer convocations. In 1983 four observers were able to find no more than 100 seals of both species during two days of observation, and some of these were probably counted twice. There has been and still is a brisk trade in the jaws of horseheads illegally killed on this French island and smuggled into Newfoundland or Nova Scotia where bounty is paid, no questions asked.
I summered on the Magdalen Islands during the 1960s and early 1970s and spent many hours watching horseheads there. In the early sixties they were more or less unmolested and were so tolerant of human beings that, on one occasion, I was able to approach a herd indolently sunbathing on a beach by swimming toward them and then crawling up on shore while pretending to be a seal myself. It was a somewhat chastening experience to find myself almost cheek by jowl with thirty or so adult horseheads who, at that close range, bulked gigantic in my timorous view. When a low-flying aircraft spooked them and sent the herd galumphing into the sea, I was momentarily terrified, not of being bitten, but of being flattened as by a herd of steamrollers. However, they avoided my prone body with deliberate ease.
When I first saw the Magdalens, the horsehead population there numbered several hundred and was slowly increasing. Introduction of the bounty and application of the “cull” has now virtually wiped them out in an orgy of destruction that disgusted Jacques Cousteau when he visited the archipelago in 1979.
Complaints by tourists about the stench from seal carcasses on the beaches of Prince Edward Island have been commonplace for several years. One stretch of beach became so unsafe for human visitors, because of ricocheting bullets fired at seals, that the federal authorities, under pressure from the island’s tourist board, were forced to forbid bounty hunting there during the tourist season. Nevertheless, our most recent survey recorded only nineteen horseheads and two dotars along nearly 100 miles of the island’s beaches—and five of these were dead, of bullet wounds.
Micmac Indians used to gather every autumn throughout most of the last century on Miscou Island to hunt seals for food and clothing. Grey seals were still common there in 1965. During a recent visit by one of my confreres, not a single seal was to be found. He was told by local fishermen that “about a dozen” had been killed the previous year, but they were now so scarce that nobody bothered to go after them.
During the past several years I have lived on the southeast coast of Cape Breton Island. When I first went there, it was not unusual to see twenty or thirty horseheads from the window of my house on almost any given summer day. Now I count myself lucky to see two or three alive in any given month.
And yet...
On January 26, 1984, the Toronto Globe and Mail published an article headed: “Seals Making Comeback, Scientists Believe
.” It contained the following assertions: “Fisheries researchers agree there are more seals today than in the recent past. ‘The population of grey seals has increased dramatically’ in the past 10 or 15 years, said Wayne Stobo, a [federal government] expert on grey and harbour seals... as human killing declined, the number of sharks also apparently dropped in northern Atlantic waters, Mr. Stobo said. So seal populations are growing... Fisheries officials are under increasing pressure to cull herds to regulate seal populations, said Dan Goodman, senior policy planning advisor of the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. Estimates of the total population of grey seals range between 30,000 and 60,000...”
When governments lie, they do so with conviction. Of the many scientists specializing in seals with whom I have talked, none believes there are more seals alive today than in the recent or the distant past. Not one considers sharks a major or even significant predator on seals in North Atlantic waters. Not even the most optimistic believes the grey seal population in Canadian waters exceeds 30,000, and some estimate less than half of that. One wryly suggested that Mr. Goodman may have been “absent-mindedly” thinking of the entire existing world population of the species!
Occasional rays of light penetrate the murk. In July of 1983 the Parliamentary Committee on Seals and Sealing, an official advisory body to Fisheries and Oceans, recommended to Pierre de Bané, LeBlanc’s successor, “that the culling of grey seals be stopped, since the committee sees no reason or justification for continuing the cull. This is in addition to our reiteration that the bounty system is inhumane and useless as a control technique.”
