Rally for the Seals
Wednesday, March 3, 2004
Canadian Embassy, Washington, D.C.

Good afternoon, everyone. I am Naomi Rose, marine mammal scientist for The Humane Society of the United States. Once again, we are in front of the Canadian Embassy, to tell the Canadian Ambassador that we are not going away. We were here to protest in November, because that's when the hunt season officially starts. We are here again in March, because this is when the ice truly runs red with blood—this is when the killing gets serious.

The Canadian seal hunt is cruel, it is unsustainable, and it is economically short-sighted. To us, these points are all completely obvious—they are equally obvious to many Canadian citizens. Unfortunately, they are not obvious to the Canadian government, particularly the provincial governments of Atlantic Canada. So we are here to drive these points home to the ambassador, so that he can report to the new prime minister that this controversy is not fading away, as the government no doubt hoped. Our voices will continue to be raised in protest, and our campaign will continue its progress, as long as the hunt continues.

As the marine mammal biologist at The HSUS, I concentrate on the lack of scientific justification for this hunt. Sealers claim that there are "too many" seals eating too many cod, blaming the crash of cod stocks on the seals' "overpopulation." The government, in contrast, accepts human overfishing as the cause of the crash, but then says that the seals are so numerous that they have prevented the cod from recovering. Yet, these arguments have no evidence to support them. Seals and cod co-existed long before people with their factory fishing vessels appeared on the scene. Seals eat cod, but not as a primary prey species. Seals also eat predators of cod. And let's not forget that the Canadian government still issues small cod quotas to fishermen. Clearly, there's more going on in this ecosystem than simply "seals eat cod."

The Canadian seal hunt, the largest commercial slaughter of wildlife in the world, is a hunt that is not supported by science. It is horrifically inhumane. It is, in fact, an anachronism whose time has past. The Canadian 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 or sealskin boots. Canada's wildlife management practices—and its economic policies—need to move out of the past and into the 21st century. It is time to end the hunt.