Sea of Slaughter

by Farley Mowat

  In 1971, ICNAF set its first Gulf/Front quota—200,000 harp seals for the ships and 45,000 for landsmen—a total just 18,000 short of the previous year’s actual landings. By season’s end in 1971, the sealers had landed 231,000, which was all they were able to get despite a massive effort to legitimize and sustain the quota by filling it. With their failure to do so, ICNAF had no alternative but to cut back. Thus the 1972 quota was reduced to 150,000. But all the sealers could kill and land that year was 136,000! They failed to fill it the next year, too.

  Whitecoats were now in decreasing supply and increasing demand, so in 1974 the price went up to $12 a pelt. This incited the industry to add more ships and men and they managed to top the quota with 154,000. In 1975, whitecoat prices went wild, soaring to as high as $22; 180,000 ice seals were reportedly landed that year, including 15,400 hoods taken against a newly established hood quota of 15,000.

  The year 1975 was also notable because of an aerial photographic survey that indicated the combined Gulf and Front adult harp seal populations now numbered no more than a million and, according to a paper by Dr. David Lavigne published by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, no more than 800,000 animals one year of age and older. Concern about these figures generated by conservation and anti-sealing organizations forced ICNAF to respond by significantly lowering the quota for 1976 to 127,000.

  The sealing industry responded by ignoring the quota. The big-ship fleet, consisting of eight vessels sailing direct from Norway and seven of Karlsen’s, took advantage of a second “good ice season” and, together with the landsmen, exceeded the quota by over 40,000. Needless to add, no punitive action of any kind was taken against them.

  By now it was apparent to even the dullest intellect that ICNAF was the patsy of the Norwegian and Canadian sealing industries. Its major role was simply to deflect public outrage away from the governments of Canada and Norway, upon whom responsibility for reining in the industry and protecting the remaining seals properly rested.

  Public outrage continued to rise. While Canadian and Norwegian governments, and the sealing industry, together did their worst to conceal the magnitude of the biocide being committed against the ice seals, their opponents were doing their best to bring it to public knowledge. One observer of the anti-sealers in action was Silver Don Cameron, contributing editor of Weekend Magazine, who went to the Front in the spring of 1976. Along with other journalists, he was a guest of Brian Davies, who had decided to challenge the Seal Protection Regulations. Cameron’s account of the affair appeared in May, 1976, under the title “The Seal Hunt: A Morality Play.” I have condensed it.

  “ ‘The helicopter regulations’, one of Davies’ people told me, ‘protect the seals by preventing those who would save them from landing within half a mile of seals which are being beaten to death.’ Since no charter company would risk the seizure of a costly helicopter, the International Fund for Animal Welfare has had to buy one, and Davies has learned to fly it. His plan is to land [four other, chartered helicopters] safely distant from the hunt then ferry the passengers right into the killing ground in his Bell Jet Ranger. If he’s impeded, he’ll point out that he’s a citizen of the United Kingdom as well as Canada, and that he’s operating in international waters outside the twelve-mile limit—and thus outside the grasp of Canadian law.

  “At 7.30 the golden light seeps westward over the frozen harbours and snowy woods. The choppers lift off and fly in formation north over the tiny fishing villages around this most northern finger of Newfoundland. Then we are over the ice, a stunning spectacle of rounded pans whirled in the tidal streams, pressure ridges where the ice has been raftered upon itself, ragged breaks and ‘leads’ of open water skimmed by ice as filmy as plastic wrap.

  “The morning is superb: bright, windless and sunny, even warm in the greenhouse of the helicopter I am in and Davies is flying. North of Belle Isle he dips down to look at two ships in the ice, but we see no seals. We fly on, our four other helicopters hanging like gigantic mosquitoes in the vast clarity of icefields and sky.

  “Finally a trio of ships lifts over the horizon, widely scattered, barely visible one from the other. They are ‘in the fat’, killing seals. The chartered helicopters set down, far from the nearest ship. Brian flies closer for a look at the hunt and we see down below the dark bodies of the mother seals, the squirming white forms of the pups, the streaks of red on the white ice near a ship.

  “Brian sets us down perhaps 200 yards from the Arctic Explorer [one of Karlsen’s ships] out of Halifax. The air is heavy with the cries of seals. Long red trails lead to the ship showing where loads of pelts have been winched aboard... And there’s this mother seal 10 feet from me.

  “She’s rocking back and forth, all 300 lbs. of her, rhythmically lifting her mouth to the sky and keening. By her belly is a plum-coloured heap of meat, all that remains of her infant. As I watch her the crying ceases. She makes no further sound, though she seems to be trying. She rocks back and forth without pause.

  “It’s like a battlefield. As far as you can see the ice is splashed with blood. Whitecoats, still living, whose mothers have ducked into the water, cry aloud. On the horizon, in black silhouette, men are swinging clubs up and down in the white glare. Our party tramps over the ice, pausing to peer down a breathing-hole where a mother seal glides past with the elegance of a ballet dancer. The tiny carcasses of whitecoats, not much bigger than a good-sized roast once the fur and fat are taken, stare at us with bulging eyes protruding from heads smashed by sealers’ clubs.

  “Here and there a red flag flutters where a pile of sculps is being assembled. Four sealers are working this part of the patch. As they approach a whitecoat, the mother lunges at them once or twice, then slips into the water. The sealer raises a blood-soaked club about like a baseball bat. With a soft thump like a muffled drumbeat the bat crushes the seal’s skull. Thick, crimson blood spouts from the whitecoat’s eyes, mouth and nose. As the pup twitches and writhes to the dying jangle of its nervous system the sealer draws a long knife and a whetstone, and hones the steel.

  “He makes a long cut from the chin down the belly to the hind flippers. The seal opens like an unzippered purse, its fat quivering like jelly, its inwards steaming in the cold.

  “We walk toward a flag and happen on a truly horrible scene: a mother seal whose head has been smashed, whose snout has been driven sideways, and who is still alive, breathing shallowly through her battered face. The women with us scream; some burst into tears; others are enraged. They rush to nearby sealers.

  “ ‘Put her down!’ cries Lisa. ‘Put her out of her misery!’

  “The sealers refuse. By law they are not permitted to kill adult seals this early in the hunt, though they may ‘defend’ themselves if a mother interferes with their work. ‘Take the flagpole’, one man tells Lisa. ‘Do it yourself.’

  “A Fisheries helicopter clatters down. Lisa rushes to it, waving her arms at the Protection officer. ‘There’s a mother seal...’

  “‘I can’t do anything about it’, says the officer. ‘I have no weapons. I’m not a doctor.’ He goes and looks, then flies away. Nothing can be done. We pursue the hunters, leaving the seal in her agony.

  “What we’re watching is comparable to killing kittens with claw hammers; it can’t be called a ‘hunt’. The day almost mocks the activity below, with the floes jammed solidly together and the sun bright and warm. As sheer spectacle, the seal herd is unforgettable: pups and mothers tucked in every nook and cranny of the ice as far as you can see. Black, sleek heads popping up in the leads and holes, inspecting the scene, then diving in unison. This endless wasteland teems with life.”

  When Cameron’s group returned to the land that evening, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police seized Davies’ helicopter and he was charged with violating the Seal Protection Regulations. Two other helicopters belonging to the Greenpeace protest movement were al
so impounded. Following publication of Cameron’s article, a new Minister of Fisheries, Roméo LeBlanc, assured an interviewer that he was determined to uphold the law of the land and protect the seals. To ensure that these objectives were achieved, he planned to place the seal fishery completely out of bounds to any except legitimate sealers.

  He was as good as his word. In June of 1977, a new Seal Protection Regulation was proclaimed making it an illegal act, subject to immediate arrest, for any person to interfere in any way with a seal hunter engaged in his proper business. It was also announced that Fisheries protection officers would henceforth be vested with the authority of peace officers and would be armed, to enable them to enforce the regulations.

  In this same year, Canada proclaimed limited sovereignty over her surrounding seas to an offshore distance of 200 miles, which brought the entire western Atlantic ice-seal population, and of course the seal hunt, under her jurisdiction and made them subject to Canadian law.

  Having reclaimed the seal “management” role, LeBlanc’s department issued a statement explaining its intentions. “Canada’s policy in seal management is consistent with its policies in the management of other living marine resources—the resources are harvested in a humane fashion, at levels which will permit a continuing sustained yield, based upon sound conservation principles which ensure the survival of the stocks, and which take into account the relationships among species as competitors, predators and prey.” I have italicized that final phrase because it contains the first public intimation of the real, but covert policy the Fisheries department was pursuing in regard to seals. A veiled reference to this policy had appeared in a departmental publication the previous year. Written by M.C. Mercer, a senior Fisheries civil servant, it included this intimation of things to come: “An argument can be advanced from the fishing industry to reduce the population [of harp seals] to a low level.”

  The covert policy, as opposed to the expressed intent, was in fact designed to reduce all species of seals inhabiting commercial fishing waters to relic levels.

  We have already seen how it was and still is being applied to grey and harbour seals. In the case of harp and hood seals, the Department of Fisheries deliberately employed the sealing industry as the instrument with which to achieve its goal.

  Not all the employees of the department were in support. One, who for obvious reasons does not wish to be identified, has this to say about it: “The Minister is usually just your average politician doing what his experts tell him, and whatever he thinks is expedient. It’s the deputies and assistant deputies backed by subservient science that really produce the policy. Remember, this is Fisheries, and seals are nowhere as economic an asset to Canada compared to fish. You have to remember, too, that since the sixties, all the important western Atlantic fisheries have been commercially depleted at such a considerable rate that natural recruitment can’t keep up, and all the main stocks are going down.

  “Fish processors and provincial government people in the Maritimes have been yelling blue murder for quite a while, and blaming federal incompetence for the decline. They had to be cooled out, but there was no way we could reduce the Canadian catch level without getting into worse trouble. For a while, we blamed the Russians and the East Bloc fishing fleets, but after we put in the 200-mile limit, that wouldn’t wash.

  “That’s where the seals came in. We’d been dumping on seals for so long, in connection with salmon and herring, that maybe some of us had begun to believe they really were major culprits. Anyhow, it wasn’t hard to make them look that way. They were a good thing to go for because nobody much gave a damn about them until Brian Davies began to stir things up. For LeBlanc, it was kind of Hobson’s choice. If he didn’t convince the fish people he was doing all he could to protect the fish stocks, he and the Liberal Party were in big trouble down east, which is where he comes from. But if he did convince them a war on seals was going to make a difference, he was going to get it in the neck from the conservationists.

  “I guess he chose what looked like the lesser of two evils, figuring he could ride out any storm the anti-sealing crowd blew up, by letting the sealers carry the ball in public. Some of us weren’t too happy about it, but what was there to do? It was the Minister’s game, and we had to play it his way.”

  I asked him whether the already grossly depleted seal population ever has been, or if it still remains, a factor in the decline of the fisheries.

  “You can make a case for it if you juggle the data—cook the figures a bit. You can also make a case for putting birds on the hit list as a threat to civil aviation because they sometimes get sucked into jet engines. There’s no solid proof seals ever were a major problem. In fact, there’s good evidence that, as an integral part of the marine biota, their presence is important to the successful propagation of a number of commercial fish species. Look at it this way: in the nineteenth century, over twice as much cod was being landed, even with old-fashioned methods, as we can get now. And there were millions of seals out there then.”

  The expectation that a policy of extirpation would succeed was buoyed by departmental studies that showed pup production of western Atlantic harps to have sunk below 230,000. This meant that reproductively active females no longer numbered much more than 250,000. If reinforcement or replacement of this breeding pool could be prevented by the annual extermination of most pups and beaters, then, when the current adult female population ceased to be productive, the harp seal nation would collapse into virtual extinction. Some experts predicted that this “final solution” could be achieved as early as 1985—providing that the sealing industry continued to perform its exterminator role.

  This could only be ensured if a profitable market for seal products could be maintained. And here was the rub, because the anti-sealing movement was campaigning internationally (and with increasing success) for a boycott of those very products, particularly whitecoat fur.

  As we have seen, LeBlanc and his predecessors had sought to deal with the protest movement by imposing arbitrary regulations intended to quarantine and sanitize the slaughter. Now Fisheries engaged in a massive, publicly funded campaign to discredit the actions and debase the motives of the protesters, at the same time aiming to convince the world that the seal pup “harvest” was a humane, properly managed, and legitimate use of a “sustainable natural resource.”

  Under cover of this propaganda barrage, LeBlanc’s department, making its first “management” decision since resuming direct jurisdiction over the seals, raised the quota from ICNAF’s 127,000 of 1976—to 170,000 for 1977. (Remember, these are landings, not the actual number of seals destroyed.) This decision was made in defiance of the recommendation of Parliament’s Advisory Committee on Seals and Sealing, which maintained that 140,000 was the absolute maximum the harp seal population could endure.

  Although reported landings of 155,143 that year seemed to confirm the COSS judgement, LeBlanc nevertheless again raised the quota, to 180,000 for 1978, nor was he deterred when in both that and the following year the sealers failed to pass the 160,000 mark. In 1980 they did better, with 172,000. Most of these “harvests,” be it noted, were composed of harp seal pups.

  The size of this last catch did not indicate an increasing seal population, as Fisheries and Oceans and the newly formed North Atlantic Fisheries Organization (a reincarnation of the now thoroughly discredited ICNAF) maintained. It was due to increased hunting pressure brought to bear through LeBlanc’s department (which had also undergone a sea-change and was now grandiloquently called Fisheries and Oceans). Through the use of federal subsidies it had encouraged construction of scores of multi-purpose fishing boats with sealing capabilities. These brought many more Newfoundlanders, Madelinots, and northern Gulf coast fishermen into the offshore hunt, and so increased the kill. Government technical support of the sealing industry had also been much improved during the late seventies. New methods of ice-forecasting and repor
ting were being used, as well as aerial reconnaissance that pinpointed the location of every significant patch of ice seals and directed the sealers to them. And more Canadian Coast Guard and Fisheries patrol vessels were being assigned to assist the sealers.

  Meantime, the Fisheries and Oceans contention that ice seals were becoming ever more numerous was being challenged. Early in 1979, two of the department’s own senior research scientists, Dr. W.D. Bowen and Dr. D.E. Sergeant, complained that population estimates being used by NAFO (and by LeBlanc’s mandarins) were unduly optimistic. In this same year, an independent study commissioned by the U.S. Marine Mammals Commission, employing Dr. John Beddington and H.A. Williams, experts in animal population dynamics at England’s York University, was completed. The report concluded that ICNAF/NAFO scientists were consistently overestimating harp seal pup production by as much as a third!

  The Fisheries and Oceans’ response was to brazenly raise the quota yet again for 1980.

  The extirpation program was proceeding on schedule, though not without furious opposition from the anti-sealing movement. While Brian Davies’ organization remained at the forefront, the protest had by now been seconded by almost every major animal welfare group extant, but not, be it noted, by the Canadian Wildlife Federation, previously referred to in connection with the wolf. The CWF publicly supported the sealing industry. More and more concerned scientists, appalled at the liberties NAFO and Fisheries and Oceans were taking with scientific methods and principles, were adding their voices to what was fast becoming a thunder of dissent.