Originally from Newfoundland, Rebecca Aldworth is the seal campaigner for the International Fund for Animal Welfare. For the past five years, Aldworth has been an observer of the Canadian seal hunt, which she has meticulously documented with an eye toward ending what is considered the world's largest slaughter of wildlife. This year, she once again led an IFAW team, as well as various journalists and dignitaries, to the ice floes in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and off Newfoundland. In many ways, Aldworth says, this year's hunt, which is scheduled to end on May 15, is as brutal as ever. She took time to talk to The HSUS about the inhumanity she witnessed on the ice—both toward the animals and the people who dared to observe and document the hunt. [Note: The interview has been edited for length and readability.]
HSUS: Can you set the scene for us? What are the ice floes like before the sealers actually arrive?
Aldworth: Well, it's something that we describe as a magical nursery. Essentially, the ice is forming a beautiful landscape. The silence is just amazing. The only sounds you hear up there are the soft cries of the baby seals. The pups are very friendly. They will actually allow you to approach them. They're not scared of people, and they're very interactive. It's really an amazing experience. There are a number of tourists who come from all over the world to experience this spectacle, and it is one of the greatest wildlife spectacles in the world.
HSUS: You describe the scene on the ice as a seal nursery, which seems like an accurate term given the fact that the mothers are gone, and of course the fathers were never there to begin with. Can you tell us how the natural behavior of harp seals actually makes these animals more vulnerable to human hunters at this time of year?
Aldworth: Certainly. Each year, the mothers come to the ice floes off of Canada's east coast, and they give birth. For the first 12 days, the mothers stay with the pups and nurse them, and the pups consume a very fatty milk. As the pups reach 12 days of age, they begin to molt, which means that they are shedding their fluffy white coat. Underneath is a beautiful silvery fur.
At the stage that they begin to shed their [white] coat, they're called "ragged-jackets." This is often the point where the mothers leave them. So when the ragged-jackets are all left on the ice, they form what we call a nursery, and essentially the white seals begin to move toward each other. For the first couple of days that the mothers are gone, you hear some very disturbing sounds across the ice. The baby seals actually cry for their mothers, who will never return. But very quickly, they get used to the idea that they've been left alone. For the next approximately six weeks after the mothers leave them, the seals fast. So they don't eat food. They simply lie there on the ice [relying on the fat stored from their mother's milk for energy].
At that point, many of them don't swim. They are very much baby seals, and that is the point when the hunters come in and slaughter them. One of the most disturbing things that I've seen on the ice are baby seals who are clubbed to death right in front of each other. Occasionally, one will try to escape, and it'll kind of move over to the edge of the water. It'll stare into the water, but because it doesn't know how to swim yet, it won't go in. It has to wait there at the water's edge until the sealer finally gets around to clubbing it to death.
HSUS: Once the sealers arrive, can you describe the techniques they typically use to kill the animals? And, in your opinion, how effective or humane are those techniques?
Aldworth: Each year that we observe the hunt in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, we see the same kind of killing techniques: Sealers prefer to club the animals to death. The ice is still fairly solid in the gulf at the time that the seals are killed. It's very easy for the sealers to get out of their boats and onto the ice. They use snowmobiles and Ski-Doos. They move across the ice very quickly, chasing the pups who are quite slow and awkward on the ice floes. The sealers run across the ice with wooden bats and hakapiks, which are long wooden poles with a metal spike on the end. Often what we see is them clubbing many seals just once on the head…striking each seal once simply to immobilize them. They come back then and club the first seal again on the head, usually, and then turn them on their back to start cutting them open.
What we often see is that as they slice the seal open, the animal will begin to move. Their flippers will clench up, their tails will clench. These are signs that the seals are still responsive to pain. Occasionally seals will cry out. You will see them actually biting at the implements that are being used to club them. It's very disturbing. When this occurs, the sealer will usually try to finish off the animal, so the sealer will turn the animal back over, if they are doing it correctly, and club the animal back on the head. But again, more often, they will simply club the seal while they're still upside-down on their back. At that point, they're clubbing them across the jaw or face, which of course doesn't kill them. So then, they'll start to cut them open again, and again the animal will move. This process will be repeated again and again until the animal has finally been skinned.
In the Front, which is just northeast of Newfoundland, the hunters there tend to use rifles as opposed to clubs. The reason is that the ice is very broken up, so it's very difficult for them to walk across the ice and club the animals. Unfortunately, because the sealers are shooting at moving seals on moving ice floes from moving boats, precision is very difficult. So what will often happen is that the sealer will simply wound the seal with the bullet.
Because the main seal-skin purchasing plant in Newfoundland deducts two dollars for every bullet hole from the price that they pay for the pelt, sealers are loathe to shoot seals more than once. So when a seal has simply been wounded, they will pull their boat up to the side of the ice pan and reach over the boat with an implement called a gaff, which is a long wooden pole with a boat-hook at the end. They will hook the animal through any part that they can access—the flipper, the tail, the jaw—and they will pull the seal up onto the boat while it is still struggling and often conscious. Then they will club that seal to death on board the boat and again go through that [skinning] process that I just described.
So clubbing is a method of killing seals that we see in both parts of the hunt, though it's more prevalent in the gulf area. Shooting with rifles is no more humane than clubbing; in fact, when they're shooting with rifles, when these animals are wounded, their first instinct is to go underneath the surface of the water. When they do that, they are often left to bleed to death slowly under water, and their bodies are never recovered. And those dead seals are not counted in the official kill statistics.
HSUS: It sounds like a very emotionally wrenching scene. What does it sound like and smell like and look like on the ice when the sealers are actually working?
Aldworth: It's hard to describe effectively how overwhelming it is. The killing is happening all around you. As we move out of our helicopters and walk toward the hunt area, all you see are lakes of blood and carcasses that replace the scenes that we saw just days ago of these live, beautiful seal pups on the ice. It's a horrific experience. As you move toward the sealers, you hear the sounds of the wooden bats hitting the skulls of the animals. It's truly disturbing. You hear seals crying out from across the ice; you hear sealers shouting to each other, occasionally laughing. Sealers make obscene gestures at you, yell insults at you, threaten you. It's a very overwhelming experience. There's cruelty everywhere you look, and everywhere you look seals are suffering. And the only thing we can legally do up there is to film what is going on and bring those images to the world.
HSUS: There's one specific scene that you've talked about and written about: a seal pup who had been clubbed but who was still conscious and bleeding among a pile of carcasses. You tried to intervene as much as you could, given the limitations of your "observer" status. Could you describe how that episode played out?
Aldworth: We had landed our helicopter in the middle of a hunt area, and there was a boat working. There were sealers all across the ice, clubbing seals as fast as they could. We followed with an Italian film crew and a German reporter and Belgian reporters as well. As we were moving behind the sealers, we noticed that they were leaving piles of carcasses, so they would club the animals and then move them all into what I call a "dead pile." We would go in and film the dead pile after they left it.
We reached one dead pile where there was a seal who was very much conscious. She was trying to crawl. She was crying out. There was blood pouring from her mouth and nose. She had been clubbed horribly on the skull, but was obviously not dead. We didn't know what to do for the first few minutes. We had no way of helping the seal; she had been mortally wounded and was clearly in agony. The only humane thing to do at that point was to put her out of her misery. But we had nothing there to euthanize her with, even if we had been able to do that under the limitations of our observation permit. If we had tried to put the seal out of her misery, we would have probably lost our observation permits because we would have been violating the marine mammal regulations that state you can only kill a seal with a sealing license.
So the only thing that we could do was to ask those sealers to come back and kill that seal. One of the hardest things that I've ever had to do, in all of my time going up onto the ice, was run across the ice and beg those sealers to come back and finish that seal off. I remember yelling across to them, "She's still alive, she's breathing and she's crying!" And they said, "No, no, no. She's dead. The dead ones always move. Don't worry about it. She's dead." I yelled back, "But she' trying to crawl, she's making sounds. Please come back and kill her." And the sealers responded, "The dead ones always cry" and refused to come back.
I then ran to another sealer, who was moving across the ice on a Ski-Doo, and I begged him to come over. He made an obscene gesture at me and intentionally ran over another seal pup with his Ski-Doo. This was allowed to continue by those sealers for more than an hour. That seal pup was still alive, struggling, and in agony, and we had nothing we could do. There were no enforcement officers anywhere in sight; no enforcement officers responded to our call. So we stayed on the ice with that seal for more than an hour, and then the fog rolled in and we had to leave. When we left, that seal was still alive. I called enforcement officers, and finally reached a boat and asked them to go out and talk to the crew and to make sure that this animal was put out of its misery. They responded that they didn't have time to deal with it that day. So that's the level of enforcement that we see up at the hunt each year.
HSUS: And that lack of response wasn't the only one. We understand there was an episode with you and a Belgian official. Both of you witnessed a hunter apparently skin a seal while the animal was still conscious. But when the Belgian complained to officers with the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans, the officers essentially blew off the report. Can you recreate that scene for us?
Aldworth: We had walked across the ice to where a boat was working. We had a Belgian member of parliament and senator with us. We had journalists from Germany and from Belgium who were also present, as well as our own camera people. When we reached the area in which the sealers were working, we saw one sealer run across the ice and club a seal once on the head. He then turned the seal onto her back and began to slice her open, and she started to move her flippers and clench her tail. Again, these are signs of conscious response to pain. He then tried to club her again, but because she was upside down at this point on her back, he was clubbing her across the jaw. He then started to slice her open again, and again she struggled. This went on and on and on, until he had finally skinned this animal, in my opinion, alive.
After this episode, we moved back toward our helicopter and noticed that a Coast Guard helicopter had landed next to ours. DFO enforcement officers approached us and requested to review our observation permits. The Belgian member of parliament spoke to the DFO enforcement officer and asked him to intervene and said, "How can you allow this to happen on the ice floes? This animal was skinned alive right in front of us." [The DFO officer] said our next course of action should be simply to talk to the office back on the Magdalen Islands, that it wasn't really his job to intervene.
That was pretty much it. He then went back to his helicopter, and they left without actually speaking to the crew of the boat who had been involved in this episode, without taking any details of the incident. And unfortunately that, in my experience, has been the level of enforcement that we see at this hunt—almost no enforcement officers on the ice, and when they are there, they seem more interested in checking our observation permits than they do ensuring that the hunting is conducted in as humane a fashion as possible.
HSUS: Speaking of "in as humane a fashion as possible," according to the marine mammal regulations in Canada, hunters are supposed to administer an eye-blink reflex test before skinning a seal. First of all, how many seals would you say you have seen skinned? And, second, how many sealers have applied the eye-blink reflex test before pulling out their knife?
Aldworth: I've seen hundreds if not thousands of animals skinned over my years on the ice. I have rarely seen the blink reflex test administered. I didn't see the test administered once this year. This is a violation, obviously, of the marine mammal regulations, but one that the government appears not to be able to enforce. In the absence of a blink-reflex test, sealers have no way of knowing that the animal that they're skinning is actually dead.
The blink-reflex test is a very simple test. All it involves is leaning over and touching the dead animal's eyeball. If it doesn't blink, it is in fact dead. If it does blink, it is a sign that the animal is alive and possibly conscious. This is when you would then move to ensure that the animal is dead prior to skinning it. This is just one of the violations that we routinely see up on the ice. I have been up there each and every year for the past five years, and since 1998, we have gathered video evidence of more than 660 probable violations of the marine mammal regulations, including seals being skinned alive. The Department of Fisheries and Oceans has not laid a single charge in response to date.
HSUS: You may have read this already, but earlier this year, a Department of Fisheries and Oceans spokesman told The Washington Post that, "Over 98% of seals are killed humanely, meaning their death was relatively quick." You've more or less answered this already, but let's just put this point blank: Do you agree with that assessment?
Aldworth: Absolutely not. That study, it should be noted, was conducted by a veterinarian on board sealing boats in the presence of Department of Fisheries and Oceans enforcement officers. So much as you are unlikely to speed if you are driving by a police officer, a sealer is not likely to engage in illegal activities in front of the very people who can take away his license for doing so. So we don't feel that the study was particularly valid, and it certainly conflicts with all the eyewitness accounts and video evidence that we have gathered over the past several years.
And it's not just IFAW observers who see these violations. It's independent journalists. It's parliamentarians. It's veterinarians. It's scientists. In 2001, a team of international veterinarians studied the seal hunt, and their report concluded that in 42% of the cases that they studied, the seals did not show enough evidence of cranial injury to even guarantee unconsciousness at the time they were skinned. So obviously the results of these two veterinary studies are polar opposite to each other. But I think the difference being that the veterinary study I talk about was not conducted on board sealing boats; it wasn't conducted in the presence of enforcement officers, and therefore the sealers were engaging in much more normal behaviors. The times that the veterinarians were observing the hunt, they were observing when sealers were unaware that they were being filmed or watched.
HSUS: Let's shift gears a little bit, and talk about how being an observer of the seal hunt, while certainly not as lethal as it is to the animals, it is also risky business. Tell us what clothing you have to wear to protect yourself and how you decide where to land on the ice pans.
Aldworth: We use very experienced pilots who are used to flying in ice conditions and landing on ice. They are able to judge the thickness of the ice simply from experience. But it is risky business. We wear survival suits, we carry survival gear with us. There's always the risk of going through a blowhole, which are holes that the seals themselves create, where they come up onto the ice. Sometimes those blowholes, which are approximately about three feet across, can get covered with a thin layer of ice and then snow, so you can actually walk right into them. And if you do, then you've just fallen into the northwest Atlantic and only have a few minutes of survival time, even in a survival suit. So we've all taken ice safety training.
The other threat, of course, is the sealers themselves, who often don't like being filmed. We've been attacked with knives, our helicopters have been attacked, we've had our camera people thrown to the ground, we've had boats ram our ice pans. It's certainly difficult work, but it's one of the most important things that IFAW is able to do in this campaign. We go up there onto the ice floes, and we bring independent journalists and parliamentarians to come up and see it for themselves. Because the only way that this hunt can continue is if it happens in secrecy, out in the ocean where no one can see it. So we bring those images back to the world to let them know what is happening at the Canada seal hunt, and that gives people the ability to put a final end to it.
HSUS: You mention a boat ramming the ice pan that the film crew was on. It sounds deliberate, and with the intent to harm. Is there ever any case where you and the others would file criminal charges?
Aldworth: We're looking into filing criminal charges on this case. We're still gathering all the footage that was taken of that incident, but certainly this was a deliberate ramming of an ice pan that a British camera crew and an IFAW representative were standing on. The ice was already broken up that day, and it was very risky business getting across the ice to where the sealers were working.
I was watching this from about 100 meters away, because I was pursuing the sealers from a different direction. What I saw and heard on my radio was the IFAW rep and camera crew getting to about 10 meters away from the sealers, and then the boat moved in and rammed the ice pan they were on. It seemed to be trying to separate them from their helicopter. As a result, the ice broke up underneath their helicopter, and it had to take off for fear of it sinking into the ocean. Our people were on that ice floe, and it began to break up and they had to jump over open areas of ocean to get to other ice pans. Several of the pans that they jumped on started to sink into the ocean as they were running across them, so it was really touch and go for a few moments as they got to their helicopter. To me, that boat was deliberately putting people in harm's way, and this behavior should not be tolerated at the seal hunt.
HSUS: Is their aggressive behavior a reflection of how courts historically have handled any sort of assault charges against them?
Aldworth: I think it's a couple of things. I think they feel immune from prosecution because, as you were saying, the history of the government reaction to their behavior. I think it's also the fact that they do feel entitled to that space. The northwest Atlantic during the sealing season is treated as though it does belong to the sealing industry, and I think that is one of our greatest problems in observing this hunt. It needs to be more broadly recognized by the Canadian government that this space belongs to all Canadians, not just to those who engage in a marginal industry like the seal hunt, and I have as much right to be up there on the ice as does a sealer.
HSUS: You've certainly spent a lot of time up there this year—and in previous seasons. You said earlier that you present this information to the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. What do they typically do with your evidence?
Aldworth: Well, we've presented more than 660 probable violations of the marine mammal regulations, and those include everything from failure to perform an eye-blink reflex test to skinning animals alive, from dragging live seals across the ice with boat hooks to shooting seals and leaving them to suffer in agony. The DFO has yet to lay a single charge in response to that evidence. And moreover, they continue to issue licenses to the very people we have caught on tape violating the regulations. What that tells sealers is that they are above the law, and that any cruel behavior will be tolerated up there on the ice floes.
HSUS: In fact, they have raised the quota to a limit of up to 350,000 harp seals in a one-year period [as part of a three-year quota of 975,000 seals]. The official season ends on May 15, which is in a few days. Have you heard any official death toll yet?
Aldworth: We have gotten kill reports. More than 320,000 seals have already been killed. The Department of Fisheries and Oceans told me that they fully anticipate the full quota of 350,000 seals will be taken this year by May 15. If it's not, I suspect the Minister of Fisheries will do what he has done, or what his predecessors have done each year for the past few years: If the quota is not reached by May 15, he will likely extend the sealing season to some point in June.
HSUS: What is the process for counting dead seals? Is it an accurate reflection of the actual number of seals killed?
Aldworth: It is not an accurate reflection of the number of animals killed. The process involves DFO enforcement officers taking tallies when the boats come into port. But what they're not counting, of course, are the seals that are shot at, that slip beneath the surface of the ice and are not recovered. They are not counting the seals where the pelts have been so destroyed, and it's simply not worth the [sealers'] while to take it back to the shore. So it's not an accurate counting system for sure.
The other thing that people need to know is that in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, sealers leave the carcasses on the ice to rot. When we talk about the number of animals killed, I think we need to bear in mind that we are looking at thousands, and hundreds of thousands of seal carcasses that are just left in the ocean or on the ice to rot. It's a wasteful hunt. It's a hunt that targets baby seals simply for their skins, and those skins are used in the fashion community in Europe.
HSUS: This year there's been a lot of attention focused on the seal hunt from the international animal activist community, including IFAW and The HSUS. Do you think it will have any impact on the DFO and whether it will scrap the seal hunt in the coming years?
Aldworth: I think it's going to have a tremendous impact. The most difficult challenge that we've had in this campaign to date is that the majority of the public simply didn't know that this hunt is back and that it's as big and cruel as ever. This has been a really difficult thing in our campaign because if people don't know what's going on up there on the ice floes, then they have no way of putting an end to it. So having the media provide the coverage that they did this year was so important to the campaign. The next step is for the public to take action. People need to log on to protectseals.org or to IFAW.org and learn what more they can do to end the hunt. The public needs to continue to let the Canadian government know that they're opposed to this hunt, and that they will not tolerate it being continued.
HSUS: Finally, Rebecca, on a personal note, it would be good for readers and listeners to know that you're not an outsider coming to this seal hunt just to protest what you see as clearly an outrage and a slaughter of wildlife. You grew up in sealing country, and now you've become a major critic of the hunt. How does this annual slaughter affect you and others who view it on the ice?
Aldworth: It's very difficult for me certainly. I grew up in a sealing community in Newfoundland, and my family knows sealers and I've grown up among sealers. I even ate seal meat when I was a child. But I had no way of knowing the true cruelty of this hunt, because like most Newfoundlanders, I had never seen it. When I was just a few years old, the local television station actually carried some footage of the hunt, and it changed me forever. I saw what was then the hunt for white coats, and we saw newborn seals being clubbed to death in front of their mothers. It was one of the most disturbing things I had ever seen.
But the first time that I ever saw this hunt, I actually went up with the International Fund for Animal Welfare, and nothing that I had seen on video or TV prepared me for just how horrific this hunt really is. As we were talking about earlier, the sights, the sounds and the smells of this hunt are just overwhelming. There is slaughter everywhere that you can see. There is blood all across the ice. The carcasses stare up at you with vacant eyes from all across the ice floes. I see people that I grew up with, who came from my part of the island in Newfoundland, treating animals in some of the most brutal fashions I have ever seen. And on a personal note, that is very difficult.
It is also very difficult that most people in Newfoundland simply don't know what's happening out there on the ice floes, and yet a lot of people from Newfoundland choose to defend this hunt because they think it's part of their tradition. But it's a tradition that needs to be changed. It's a tradition that has really, in so many ways, put Newfoundland in bad light internationally and has tarnished Canada's international reputation. At the same time, it is also such a marginal industry, economically speaking. It brings in so little money. Even in Newfoundland, where 93% of the hunt happens, it's less than one-tenth of one percent of the gross domestic product of the island. Less than one percent of Newfoundlanders actually engage in this industry, which is why so many of us know nothing about it. So again, it's an industry we could all live without.
IFAW and The HSUS support the idea of working to find economic solutions for the people of Canada's east coast. But we believe there are better ways to invest taxpayers' dollars and better solutions for the poverty that exists in some rural communities in Newfoundland.
