Rally for the Seals
Wednesday, November 5, 2003
Canadian Embassy, Washington, D.C.
Good afternoon, everyone. I am Naomi Rose, marine mammal
scientist for The Humane Society of the United States. We are
holding this rally today to let the Canadian Ambassador know
how serious we are about ending the seal hunt in Canada. This
hunt, as Rebecca Aldworth has emphasized, is terribly cruel,
but it is also unsustainable from a conservation point of
view.
In fact, there is no defensible economic, biological, or
resource management justification for killing hundreds of
thousands of these seals each year. The only justification is
political. When natural resources are managed by politics
rather than by science and the Precautionary Principle,
wildlife and habitat suffer.
What biological reasons are offered to justify this hunt?
Sealers claim that there are "too many" seals, who voraciously
helped to wipe out the codfish stocks in the North Atlantic.
While the government carefully avoids this particular claim, it
does maintain that the seals have contributed, after years of
reduced fishing quotas, to the failure of the cod to recover to
their former numbers.
These arguments unfortunately appeal to many people who make
a living from the ocean, but it is absurd. Seals—probably in
greater numbers than they exist today—and cod co-existed for
millennia before people with their factory fishing vessels
appeared on the scene. Plain and simple, it is human
over-fishing that caused the crash of North Atlantic cod. Even
scientists with Canada's Department of Fisheries and Oceans
[DFO] acknowledge this fact.
As for seals preventing the cod stock's recovery, nothing in
nature's ecosystems is so simple. Seals not only eat cod, they
eat predators of cod—the primary predators of fish (aside from
people) are other fish. Therefore, removing seals from the
ecosystem may actually impede cod stock recovery.
Again, the DFO's scientists have cautioned the government
that there is no evidence that removing seals from the
ecosystem will help recover the cod. In fact, the cod were far
more likely to have been negatively impacted by the
government's continued issuance of small cod quotas to
fishermen over the years, long after the population crash, as a
political sop to this vocal constituency.
Given the massive decline in cod numbers, even this small
additional pressure from commercial fishing was probably enough
to prevent recovery—and it was only this past year that the
government finally closed the Gulf of St. Lawrence fishery
(with several areas still remaining open to fishing), which
inspired a predictable protest from the local fishermen. Their
representatives pointed the finger at the "exploding" seal
population and pushed even harder for a hunt aimed at reducing
seal numbers.
But as an historical matter, whenever people try to 'fix' an
ecosystem imbalance caused by their own activity, they
generally make it worse. In short, culling seals to help cod is
an equation that doesn't add up.
The Canadian seal hunt is the largest commercial slaughter
of wildlife in the world. This is hardly an achievement Canada
should want to be known for. It is a hunt whose quotas are not
supported by science—placing the Canadian management agencies
at the trailing edge of resource management practices.
This hunt is a cull to reduce numbers—it targets young
animals who have not yet reproduced, and managers do not
require "struck-and-lost" animals (that is, those mortally
wounded, but not recovered) to be counted against the quota. In
fact, if struck-and-lost animals are considered, the total kill
each year almost certainly exceeds half a million seals.
The Canadian seal hunt is an anachronism whose time has
past. The government should focus its energies and funding on
diversifying the economy of Atlantic Canada—people would spend
far more money to travel to Newfoundland to view live seals
breeding on the ice than they would pay for seal jerky. Canada
needs to move out of the past and into the 21st century and
modernize its resource management, its economies, and its
attitudes. It is time to end the hunt.
Thank you.
