Sea of Slaughter

by Farley Mowat

  Copies had already gone overseas, there to be further copied and distributed. In West Germany, Dr. Bernard Grzimek of the Frankfurt Zoo not only showed it on television, Europe-wide, but launched a popular crusade to force the Canadian government to “halt this murderous atrocity.” Bewildered Canadian embassy staffs soon found themselves beleaguered by picketers and showered with hate mail. As one unhappy spokesman for the sealing industry put it, with surely unconscious humour, “The fat was in the fire.”

  Indeed it was. Although the Canadian and Norwegian governments, supporting and supported by the sealing industry, did everything in their power to smother the uproar, they only succeeded in intensifying it. In the words of a federal employee, “The combination of that lovable little seal-pup image and the visible result, when what was really just a sack of blood and guts was spilled onto the ice, couldn’t be handled rationally... facts and figures can’t counter stuff like that. If we’d been killing baby squids we could’ve held our own maybe, but baby seals?”

  Goaded and prodded into angry reactions, Canadian authorities counter-attacked by stigmatizing those who complained about the seal slaughter as deluded dupes, bleeding hearts, or self-serving publicists. The Department of Fisheries rallied its experts and set them to disseminate the “true facts.” Having vehemently denied that any cruelty was involved in commercial sealing—“such accusations amount to an unwarranted slur on honest, working fishermen”—departmental spokesmen insisted that the sealing industry was a vital and sustaining element in the Canadian economy and was being rationally and humanely managed.

  “The seal fishery is properly regulated,” said the Honourable H.R. Robichaud, the federal Minister of Fisheries, as he hurriedly introduced the first regulations ever to be imposed on the sealers. As of the spring of 1965, he announced, access to the seal fishery would be reduced by the introduction of a licensing system requiring the owner of each ship or aircraft to pay a fee of $25 for the right to “harvest” harp or hood seals. Furthermore, in order to protect the stock, a quota of 50,000 seals would be imposed on the Gulf sealers, and Fisheries officers would be assigned to supervise the operation and ensure adherence to the laws. Finally, in order to give the lie to accusations of cruelty, representatives of animal welfare groups would be escorted to the Gulf ice fields so they could satisfy themselves, and the world, that the seals were being killed with all due consideration.

  Licensing ships and aircraft was a mockery. Even had the fee imposed been realistic, it would have had little or no effect unless the number of licences issued was limited, and it was not. Supervision of the slaughter in 1965 by Fisheries officers consisted of counting the sculps delivered by planes and ships—a rather rough count, too, since the quota was exceeded by some 4,000 whitecoats. The visit of the observers to the ice that season was thoughtfully scheduled for the second week of the “harvest” and therefore did not take place, because the quota, quite predictably, had been filled in the first four days by ten big ships and sixty or more aircraft that ravaged the Gulf whelp-ing patches.

  Finally, the quota of 50,000 whitecoats applied only to the Gulf, and only to big ships and aircraft. Landsmen, small vessel operators, gunners, and netters everywhere remained free to take all the seals, young or old, that they could kill. As for the slaughter at the Front, by mutual agreement between Canada and Norway, it continued without any supervision or restrictions, pretended or real.

  Mr. Robichaud’s smoke-and-mirrors trick might conceivably have worked had it not been for the intransigence of a single individual. He was Brian Davies, a Welsh-born thirty-five-year-old immigrant to Canada who, in 1964, was supporting himself as a student teacher while working part-time for the New Brunswick Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

  Davies saw the Artek film and was deeply disturbed, but not entirely convinced that such horrors could be perpetrated in the land of his adoption. How to find out the truth? There was only one way. Davies went to the ice himself.

  “Maybe it’s pompous, but what I saw changed my life,” he told me some years later. “You’ve been there. You’ve seen what goes on. Words don’t work to describe that kind of barbarism. It couldn’t be allowed to go on. Somebody had to stop it. I never had any doubt what I had to do.”

  During the years that followed, Davies was to find himself pilloried by government authorities, the sealing industry, and some of the media as a self-seeking, self-serving fanatic of dubious morality and questionable ethics. At the same time he was being elevated to the godhead by animal lovers everywhere, who saw him as a latter-day St. Francis of Assisi. Davies waged his war to save the seals mainly by manipulating the media, and he did this with such skill that, almost single-handedly, he transformed the image of the dark-eyed, soulful-seeming whitecoat into an international symbol of revolt against the old established, merciless, and selfish view of non-human life. Eschewing reason, he frankly played on emotions in the belief that this was the only way to defeat the forces arrayed against him. These forces responded not only by savage vilification of the man and his supporters, but by attempting to bury him, together with the truth about the seal slaughter, under an avalanche of persiflage.

  The worthlessness of the $25 licence fee was demonstrated in 1966 when not less than a hundred fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters took part in the slaughter at the Gulf. Planes and ships harvested their 50,000 quota in jig time, and that spring Gulf whitecoat landings rose to 86,000, together with some 18,000 adult seals.

  This time, the official observers reached the scene on opening day. The group included government officials led by Mr. Robichaud and representatives from the Ontario Humane Society. An independent biologist, Dr. Douglas Pimlott from the University of Toronto, also attended. Although Pimlott reported seeing three sealers club fifty-nine pups on one floe and then abandon them, the group issued this joint statement: “[We examined] the skulls of many hundreds of whitecoats... killed by men working from both ships and aircraft. Examination of the carcasses indicated that the majority had been struck on the head by some instrument with sufficient force to crush the skull. In our opinion, these animals have been rendered completely unconscious and unable to feel any pain.”

  However, members of the official group were not the only observers on the ice that spring. Brian Davies was there, too, and he also brought an expert, Dr. Elizabeth Simpson, a qualified veterinarian. She reported that as many as half the whitecoat corpses she examined could well have been alive when they were skinned.

  Such was the beginning of a singularly unedifying battle between various humane and animal welfare agencies, with some vehemently supporting the official contention that the baby seals perished, if not happily, at least painlessly, while others insisted that many whitecoats died agonizing deaths.

  While press and public concentrated their concern on this aspect of the carnage on the whelping ice of the Gulf, sealers elsewhere carried on as usual. During the spring of 1966, thirteen Norwegian and seven of Karlsen’s vessels loaded 160,000 whitecoats at the Front. They also took at least 45,000 adult harps as well as 25,000 hood seals from a total local hood population that probably no longer exceeded three times that number.

  That autumn the Canadian government, acting to protect itself in anticipation of the inevitable discovery by the public of the horrendous destruction at the Front, arranged for the nominal control of sealing there to be vested in the International Commission for the North Atlantic Fishery (ICNAF), a body including bureaucrats and scientists of the governments of Canada, Norway, and Denmark that was already notorious for taking little or no action directed at conservation if this might cause distress to the commercial fishing industry.

  The Department of Fisheries also decreed some new conservation measures for the Gulf, including a prohibition on hunting during the hours of darkness (when not even the most foolhardy sealer would risk being on the ice) and a ban on the killing of adult female seals on the whe
lping patches—except in self-defence, which meant except when sealers wanted them. The efficacy of the regulations was clearly demonstrated by the 1967 “hunt.” Although the quota for whitecoats remained at 50,000 in the Gulf, actual landings there were above 100,000 seals, of which the great majority were harp pups. This year saw the largest single slaughter in the Gulf since World War II. And at the Front 232,000 harp and hood seals died. They, too, were mostly pups.

  After the butchery of 1967 had ended, Mr. Robichaud addressed the media. He first remarked of the anti-seal hunt activists, who were becoming increasingly numerous and vocal: “One cannot but be awed at the intensity of the campaign being waged by a group of people led by Mr. Brian Davies, which is blackening the Canadian image both here and in other countries.” He then went on to assure the reporters that “In 1967 the Canadian seal fishery was the most tightly regulated operation of its kind anywhere in the world. The regulations specified the type and specifications of the club which could be used in taking the young and the types of firearms and ammunition which could be used to kill older seals. It was clearly emphasized that the flensing operation was not to be started until the animal was, without doubt, dead. A system of licensing and identification of sealers was also brought in. Moreover special responsibilities were placed on sealing ship captains and aerial operators to have the regulations adhered to.”

  The Minister of Fisheries concluded by saying: “I hold firmly to the basic tenet that in the utilization of any creature for our welfare, the utmost attention must be given to handling them in the most humane way possible, and to their continuance as a species in perpetuity. This is the objective we have set ourselves and which we are achieving in the harvesting of our Atlantic seal resources.”

  In the spring of 1968, photographer John de Visser and I went to the Gulf to observe this “most tightly regulated operation of its kind anywhere in the world.” It was a grim experience. On one occasion, de Visser watched an aircraft hunter club his way through a patch of about thirty pups, killing six and wounding a number of others before leaping to another pan and abandoning his victims. On two occasions, I saw pups returning to consciousness while being skinned alive. When I remonstrated with a ship sealer for clubbing to death a female that had elected to try to save her pup, he grinned at me and replied, “We got to protect ourselves, now don’t we?”

  I talked to members of the Brian Davies contingent and to the rival “official” observer group led by Mr. Tom Hughes of the Ontario Humane Society. Hughes was adamant in insisting that the hunt, as he persisted in calling it, was “just as humane as any other well-regulated abattoir operation.” I talked with Fisheries officers, scientific experts, and ordinary sealers. I concluded that the massacre was just that—an almost uncontrolled orgy of destruction conducted by, and for, people who were prepared to commit or to countenance almost any degree of savagery in order to maintain a high rate of profitability. But, unquestionably, the aerial sealers were guilty of the worst atrocities.

  When I asked a senior Fisheries official why his department did not ban the aircraft “hunt,” which was the cause of so much of the public criticism, he replied, off the record, that it would be impolitic to do so. The aircraft owners, he pointed out, were independent Canadian businessmen and any attempt to keep them off the Gulf ice would provoke an unacceptable political backlash.

  In any event, the Norwegians arranged to rid themselves of these interlopers. They did this by the simple expedient of dropping the price of whitecoat pelts, of which they were the sole buyers. In 1967 they reduced the price to $6, which was intended to be low enough to prevent aircraft sealers from making a worthwhile profit. This did have some effect, but not as much as had been hoped for; so the report was circulated that the top price next year would be a mere $2. At that price, all but a handful of the aircraft hunters quit. However, after the 1968 ship/aircraft quota had been filled (mostly by the ships), the buyers began paying landsmen as much as $6 a sculp. That was the end of aircraft “participation in the seal harvest,” as a Charlottetown newspaper prettily put it.

  My visit to the Gulf convinced me that, although the cruelty problem was real enough, the main issue was whether the ice seals could survive at all in the face of the enormous and virtually uncontrolled destruction they were suffering.

  Robichaud had now given way to a new Fisheries Minister, the Honourable Jack Davis, a politician who was something of an anomaly since he was not wholly encapsulated within an impermeable membrane of preconvictions and prejudices. It seemed possible that he might be persuaded to reconsider the policies of his department toward the seals. I had some discussions about this with Robert Shaw, his Deputy Minister, who gave me grounds for hope. Early in 1969 I was told the Minister of Fisheries would take steps to halt the haemorrhage of the ice-seal nations, which had accounted for some 300,000 seals that spring.

  Davis established an ad hoc seal advisory committee, and when this group confirmed to him that both harp and hood seal herds were in severe decline and urgently needed protection, he responded by proposing to prohibit the killing of any whitecoats at the Gulf in 1970 and by forging what he believed was a valid agreement with the Norwegian government to refrain from taking whitecoats at the Front.

  Thereupon all hell broke loose.

  Assailed by the sealing industry on the one hand and by politicians from the Atlantic Provinces on the other, Davis’s position was undercut by his own senior civil servants and some of his scientific advisers. These sided with ICNAF (of which they were a part) in its refusal to countenance even a reduction, let alone a ban on whitecoat killing. The final blow came when Norway repudiated the agreement to prohibit its nationals from taking whitecoats at the Front. Backed into a corner, Davis withdrew his intended conservation measures and, as his Deputy Minister put it, “pulled back to lick his wounds.”

  The 1970 slaughter took place as usual. The Gulf quota of 50,000 for large vessels remained unchanged and, in the absence of the airborne killers, was now filled in the main by the Norwegian interests. There were no quotas at the Front, and no restraint was exercised by ICNAF. There was, however, such a notable decline in seal numbers that the Norwegian fleet (which was now alone in those icy waters) could only manage to load 257,000 sculps of all ages and both species.

  By now Brian Davies and his supporters were having such an inflammatory effect internationally, as well as in Canada, that they were disowned by the conservative wing of the animal protection movement. Undaunted, Davies (who had formed his own organization, the International Fund for Animal Welfare) redoubled his efforts to enlist world opinion against the ongoing slaughter. By mid-1970 he was having such success that the “seal affair” was becoming a matter of real embarrassment to Ottawa. At this juncture, the Department of Fisheries, which was naturally the chief target, was merged into the newly created and innocently named Department of the Environment, from which camouflaged retreat it issued a new set of Seal Protection Regulations.

  Henceforward, no unauthorized aircraft would be permitted to fly lower than 2,000 feet above harp or hood seal whelping ice or to land within half a nautical mile of a breeding patch. This decree was later amended to make it illegal to land within that distance of any seal of either species during the whelping season. Spokesmen from the department explained that this cabinet order (it was never debated in Parliament) was intended not only to stop aerial hunting but to protect the seals from being disturbed by aircraft while whelping or nursing their offspring.

  Although the uninitiated in Canada and abroad regarded this new regulation as highly laudable, it constituted a cynical deception. Aerial hunting had been defunct since 1968 and enjoyed no prospects of revival; in consequence, the only aircraft to visit the whelping ice were either those carrying government scientists and officially endorsed observers and Fisheries officers, or anti-hunt protesters, the press, and independent scientists and investigators. Those in the first category we
re authorized to “disturb the seals” where, when, and as they desired. In general, those in the second category were to be denied access, not only to the whelping patches, but effectively to the entire region, since single seals were to be found almost anywhere in the Gulf and at the Front.

  In short, this despotic stricture was not designed to protect the seals, it was intended to protect the sealers (who, presumably, did not disturb the whitecoats or their mothers when bashing in their skulls), as well as the sealing industry and the government of Canada, by preventing the truth of what was happening on the ice from reaching the general public.

  Oddly enough, the Minister of the Environment, as Jack Davis had now become, was not yet resigned to an acceptance of the political realities as defined by his own mandarins. In the same year that the new Seal Protection Regulations were promulgated, he formally established a House of Commons Advisory Committee on Seals and Sealing (COSS). In January of 1971, this group, which included two respected independent scientists, recommended to Parliament that the entire ice-seal hunt be phased out by no later than 1974 and that both harps and hoods then be given at least six years free from sealers to allow them to at least partially recoup their numbers. Davis agreed to implement these recommendations.

  Much of what ensued thereafter in the murky bowels of Ottawa remains opaque. However, the outcome was crystal clear. A somewhat subdued Minister announced that, after all, Canada did not feel she could take unilateral action in what was clearly a matter of international commercial concern, therefore she would place the future of all harp and hood seals that frequented her waters in the hands of ICNAF; which was about the same as shifting it from the right hand to the left.

  ICNAF, which had done nothing to conserve or protect either the Front herds or the dwindling remnants off the east Greenland coast, rose to the occasion by sonorously proclaiming a Harp and Hood Seal Protocol, under which it would establish an overall quota for western Atlantic seals. The quota would be determined on the basis of impeccable biological data and used as a tool for “scientific management,” not only to ensure that there would be no further depletion, but to restore the harps and hoods to something approaching their original abundance.