Red Tide Rising
How Canadian subsidies led to a new slaughter of seal pups
TWILLINGATE, NEWFOUNDLAND--Along the icy northeastern coast of this island, on a craggy bay buried in fog and mist, Jack Troake lives with his wife, Florence, in the same modest, beige house that he was born in 65 years ago. Each spring, he heads up the coast for a 14-day journey in his 54-foot boat, the Lone Fisher, to hunt seals. This year, Troake and his crew landed nearly 1,000 seals, and with pelt prices at an all-time high of $70 Canadian, it could be their best hunt ever. "You seal, sir, to make some money," he says. "If there is a good hunt, everyone gets a bit, even the church."
In the early 1980s, animal-rights protests led to a virtual shutdown of the seal fur industry. But in recent years, the Canadian government has quietly orchestrated a comeback of the hunt, and today sealers kill more animals--up to 275,000 a year--than at the height of the protests. Sealers and government officials insist the hunt came back because of increased demand for seal fur in Europe and Asia. But a U.S. News review of Canadian government records shows it was subsidies offered to the hunters, not pelt prices, that wrought the harvest of large numbers. Moreover, interviews with sealers, former government scientists, and animal-rights activists suggest the Canadian government reinstituted the hunt to make up for its mismanagement of the northern cod, once the foundation of the Newfoundland economy. Seals, which eat cod, became the scapegoat. "If you are the guy who drives the ship into the rock, you want to blame something else rather than your own incompetence," says Ransom Myers, a former researcher for the federal Fisheries Department. "You want to blame the seal."
It was the sight of baby seals being bashed on the head that led to the first protests. In 1977, Greenpeace flew Brigitte Bardot to the Labrador ice to cuddle a seal pup while Paul Watson, a cofounder of the group, skirmished with hunters on the ice. "It is the largest slaughter of wildlife, and it is the cruelest," says Watson, a Canadian whose memoir of the seal protests comes out this fall. Meanwhile, the International Fund for Animal Welfare, a U.S.-based activist group, began pushing hard for European governments to ban the sale of prized white-coat pelts--those from seals less than two weeks old. The United States already had marine mammal prohibitions in place, and the activists believed that a shutdown of the European market would mean the end of commercial sealing. They were right. In October 1983, the European ban went into effect, and the average number of seals killed each year dropped from 165,000 to 52,000--which were used locally.
But since 1996, that has all changed, and the reason lies in fishing. In 1988, Canadian scientists discovered they had overestimated the size of the fish population. The Grand Banks off Newfoundland, once abundant in cod, had been badly overfished. "Recent catch levels simply cannot be maintained without causing a significant and potentially very serious decline," a panel of outside experts warned in 1990. It suggested cutting the catch by more than half. But, says John Crosbie, the federal minister of fisheries and oceans from 1991 to 1993, "no government could change the total allowable catch that much. It wasn't politically acceptable." So Canadian and foreign boats continued to overfish the waters. Within two years the cod were depleted, and in July 1992, Crosbie announced a two-year moratorium on cod fishing. Boats sat idle. Processing plants closed. Thirty-eight thousand people, 7 percent of the population, were put out of work--costing Canada $1.9 billion in job training and unemployment benefits.
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