Controversial Seal Hunt Underway in Eastern Canada

The Canadian government has authorized the killing of 325,000 seals this year, in the annual seal hunt that is conducted on the ice floating on the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The hunt began last Saturday around the Iles de-la-Madeline archipelago in Quebec, where some 91,000 baby seals were clubbed to death in the last few days. Animal rights groups and millions of people around the world have protested the hunt for years, calling the killings a cruel slaughter that is carried out purely for profit, and the Canadian government not only supports it, it encourages it.

Opponents of the seal hunt rented helicopters and boats to film the seal hunters. A spokeswoman for the Canadian branch of the World Society for the Protection of Animals, Melissa Tkachyk, told reporters, "Our organization, the World Society for the Protection of Animals, is opposed to this hunt because it's the largest and the cruelest slaughter of marine animal species found anywhere on the planet and I think that's a shame for our country." Unstable ice, bad weather conditions, and the poor quality of the seal pelts slowed down the hunt in the first few days, but it will continue.

Critics’ strongest argument against the hunt has always been that the methods used for hunting the baby seals are particularly inhumane. Seals as young as only 12 days old can be killed legally, and government figures show that in the hunts conducted in 2002 and 2003, over 96% of the nearly 300,000 seals killed were between 12 days and 12 weeks old. Anyone with a commercial sealing license or Provincial hunting license can kill seals, with no training or experience necessary. The hunters kill the seals in a variety of ways, including shooting, clubbing, and stabbing them with a large ice pick. Some of the seals are skinned while they are still alive and conscious.

The government says that the killings will not affect the seal population in any negative way, because Greenland’s seal population has almost tripled in the past 30 years and there are now almost 6 million seals in the area. This is the third year that Canada is allowing an increased quota on the number of seals that can be killed legally. This year’s hunt is part of a three-year Seal Hunt Plan developed by the Canadian government, and a total of 350,000 baby seals will be killed during the entire period of the hunt.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper said that Canada is the victim of "an international propaganda campaign" by animal rights activists and celebrities, and the government will not fold under pressure to call a halt to its annual seal hunt. Harper told reporters, "That’s not on our agenda today (to stop it)." The Canadian Sealers Association President Frank Pinhorn said of the protestors, "They’re using the graphic images of seals, the harvesting of seals on the white ice and the blood to promote their own selfish lifestyles."

Dozens of prominent public figures including Brigitte Bardot, Paul McCartney, Kim Basinger, Juliette Binoche, Richard Dean Anderson, and even the Dalai Lama have campaigned against the annual hunt over the years.