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save the harp seals incidents of them |
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Cruelty. The DFO claims that the seal hunt is “humane and professional” and that violations of the Marine Mammal Regulations, which prohibit various forms of cruel treatment of seals and other animals, are relatively rare. The regulations require, for example, that a hunter using a hakapik or other club must strike the seal on the head until its skull is crushed and that he must check the skull or administer a “blinking reflex test” (by pressing his finger against the seal’s eye) to determine that the seal is dead before he strikes another animal. The regulations also forbid a hunter from bleeding or skinning a seal before he has determined that it is dead using one of the prescribed tests.
However, reports by anti-hunting groups and some independent scientific observers since the late 1990s indicate that hunters routinely ignore these regulations. Among the more than 700 apparent violations witnessed (and often filmed) by these groups were: failure to administer a blinking reflex test; allowing wounded but obviously conscious seals to suffer in agony while hunters strike or shoot other seals; dragging obviously conscious seals across the ice with boat hooks; throwing dying seals into stockpiles; killing seals by stabbing them through the head with picks and other illegal weapons; and skinning seals while they were not only alive but conscious. In 2001 a report by an international veterinary panel whose members observed the hunt and examined the carcasses concluded that it was likely that 42 percent of the animals studied had been conscious when they were skinned.
The DFO has disputed this finding, citing a report by five Canadian veterinarians based on observations of the same hunt, which stated that 98 percent of the killings they observed were performed in an “acceptably humane manner.” The DFO does not acknowledge, however, that the observations in the second study were conducted in the presence of hunters, who therefore knew they were being watched, and that the study’s conclusion was based on the number of seals who were observed to be conscious when they were brought to the hunting vessel (3 out of 167), not on the manner in which the remaining seals were killed on the ice or on whether the seals were conscious when they were dragged to the ship. Although anti-hunting groups have submitted the testimonial and photographic evidence they have collected to the DFO, the agency has so far failed to investigate any of the documented cases.
Conservation. The DFO claims that its policies are based on “sound conservation principles” and that the TACs are designed to “ensure the health and abundance” of the seal herds. In response to charges by independent scientific bodies and intergovernmental organizations—such as the North Atlantic Marine Mammal Commission—that continued hunting on the scale of recent years will result in a long-term decline in the number of seals and possibly even their extinction, the DFO asserts that the size of the current herd is “nearly triple” what it was in the 1970s and that the harp seal is in no way an endangered species. In the 1970s, however, the number of harp seals had been reduced by two-thirds, to about 1.8 million, by two decades of intensive hunting, during which the number seals killed each year was less than or roughly equal to the large TACs set by the DFO since 1996. Indeed, in 1974 Canadian government scientists recommended a ten-year moratorium on seal hunting to give the herd time to recover (the moratorium did not take place). The size of the current herd, therefore, represents a partial recovery made possible by the smaller hunts of the 1980s.
Economic issues. The DFO claims that the seal hunt is economically important and that the industry as a whole does not depend on subsidies from the Canadian government. In fact, however, the revenue earned from the sale of seal pelts and other products, about $16.5 million CDN in 2005, represents only about 2 percent of the value of Newfoundland and Labrador’s fishing industry and less than 1 percent of the provincial economy as a whole. The roughly 4,000 commercial fishermen who take part in the seal hunt each year use it to supplement their incomes during the fishing off-season; it is not a primary livelihood for any of the hunters. Although the DFO states that all subsidies ceased in 2001 (some $20 million CDN had been provided in the 1990s), the seal industry continues to rely on subsidies in various forms, including the provision of Canadian Coast Guard icebreaking and search-and-rescue services; the funding of a seal processing plant in Quebec in 2004; the management of the hunt by DFO officials; the funding of research into the development of new seal products, such as a putative human-health supplement made from seal oil; and the marketing and diplomatic promotion of the industry throughout the world. Seal-hunt opponents also point out the indirect but substantial costs of the hunt in the form of business lost by numerous Canadian firms because of the negative image of Canada in the rest of the world or more directly because of boycotts directed at specific Canadian industries, such as the boycott of Canadian seafood by the HSUS. Although exact figures are difficult to come by, some independent experts believe that, when all of the direct and indirect costs associated with the industry are taken into account, the seal hunt in Canada actually constitutes a net drain on the country’s economy.Dead harp seals wait to be collected by seal hunters during the hunt on the ice in the Gulf of St. Lawrence on April 1.
 iLight Roxas · Mon Jun 02, 2008 @ 08:37pm · 0 Comments |
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