Battle over annual seal slaughter

Press, 26 February 1977, Page 12

Battle over annual seal slaughter

By

ERIC DOWD

in Toronto

About 400 fishermen and members of at least three animal-welfare groups will meet next month in a battle of words — and possibly more — on the bleak, shifting, dangerous pack ice, 50 miles off Canada’s north-east tip.

The anima! lovers will be protesting the annual slaughter of three-weeks-oid, fluffy baby harp seals, whose skins are sold to make coats and jackets for fashion-conscious women around the world. Fishermen from Canada and Norway, who swarm on to the ice from ships once the Canadian Government gives the word to start, smash in the seals’ skulls with heavy clubs in a hunt that has continued almost since North America was discovered by Europeans. Protests have steadily mounted. The International Fund for Animal Welfare, which last year flew out half-a-dozen pretty air hostesses who tried unsuccessfully to stand between hunters and their prey, will this year use helicopters again to fly out journalists from a dozen countries, hoping their reports of the slaughter will help the pressure to get the hunt abandoned.

The Greenpeace Foundat'on, wnich has sailed into danger zones in the Pacific in vain attempts to head off French nuclear explosions, has set up a base from which it plans to protest, but is not revealing its plans. Last winter, Greenpeace members planned to spray the seals with green dye, to make theirt pelts commercially worthless, hoping this would lead to the hunt being called off. But they had some of the dye snatched from them by fishermen and were eventually talked out of their plan. The big new element this year is a Swiss millionaire industrialist, Mr Franz Weber, who arrived in Ca-

nada this month hoping to buy off the seal hunt with cash. Mr Weber, who has been active in Europe in opposing building developments encroaching on countryside and historic sites, also heads an organisation called Save Our Seals.

He said at first his organisation would pay $400,000 to compensate the fishermen if the hunt was called off, and offered to establish factories in Eastern Canada that would turn out synthetic furs to provide alternative jobs. Canadian officials pointed out the hunters expect to sell the skins of the 170,000 seals they will be permitted to kill this year for about $2,500,000, and Mr Weber, undaunted, replied he thought he could raise that amount of money.

But when he came to a meeting with Canada’s Minister of Fisheries, Mr Romeo Leßlanc, the Swiss millionaire called the hunt “a slaughter of wild-life babies” and said he represented “the intense revulsion of world opinion” at it. Mr Leßlanc took offence and replied that Canada “will not accept blackmail” and said Mr Weber’s criticism was "not based on facts.” The Minister told the conservationist to go and make his offer to the fishermen. When last heard from. Mr Weber was trying to book hotel rooms in sparsely populated northern Newfoundland for 600 journalists he says he plans to fly from around the world to try to make sure people on every continent are fully aware how the seal hunt is conducted.

Opponents of the hunt have a wide lange of objections, but not all of them share the same views. Some object to any killing of animals, others to killing for skins. (Some, but not all, the hunters sell the blubber — the baby seals weigh be-

tween 45 and 801 b — for use in making food oils and cosmetics, and many Newfoundlanders consider seal flippers a delicacy.) Opponents also say the method of killing is cruel, but the “anadian Government claims a single blow on the head “either kills the seal outright or puts it into a state of deep, irreversible unconsciousness” and is the “most humane method” it knows. The Ministry of Fisheries claims that mother seals “generally do not show

signs of bereavement at the loss of their pups, as do dogs and many other animals,” but protesters have shown some poignant films of mothers waddling back to their baby seals and finding only skinned heaps of blubber.

Some opponents also claim the seal hunt is endangering the species, and there is no doubt that in the past the seals have been overfished. But the Ministry of Fisheries claims that there are now about ’ 1,200,00

harp seals off the Northeastern coast of Canada and the population is steadily increasing. It says the quota that Canada allows to be killed each year has been set at a level which will enable the herds to increase to about 1,600,000 seals, the maximum the waters can sustain without the seals running short of fish to feed on.

The basic reason the Canadian Government permits the hunt is economic: it provides a substantial part of

tneir annual income lor many fishermen of Eastern Canada. This year a Canadian organisation is attempt ing to whip' up some economic pressure to stop it. The Society for Animals in Distress has written to animalwelfare societies in 58 countries asking their members to boycott Canadian-made goods until the seal hunt — “Canada's shame,” the society' calls it — is abolished. The hunt starts officially on March 14.