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| The HSUS |
A sealer brings his hooked club down on a
seal pup April 5. |
by Loren Drummond
After days of delays and searching for surviving seal pups, The HSUS documented sealers in the acts of shooting and clubbing seal pups, slaughtering seals as young as three weeks old. Sealers then hooked the pups, dragged them across the ice, skinned them on the decks of their boats, and threw their small bodies back onto ice and into the sea.
"They killed every single seal pup they found," said Rebecca Aldworth, The HSUS director of Canadian wildlife issues. Aldworth, who grew up in Newfoundland and has observed the hunt for nine years, watched the gruesome scenes from helicopter.
Only seven boats were spotted by The HSUS operating in the northern Gulf of St. Lawrence, but the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans said that 15 were operating, likely killing several thousand of the scarce seal pups today. Sealers have been killing seals in the northern Gulf since April 4.
Canadian government officials and observers have both said it has been a terrible year for harp seals. The fisheries agency claimed the herd was "healthy and abundant" a week ago when it set the quota of seals to be killed this year at 270,000 seals. At the time, the agency also acknowledged that more than 90 percent of the seal pups likely died in the southern Gulf this spring. Ice pans melted out from under the newborns before they were able to swim in the water.
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Harp Seals: A Look at Victims of the Hunt |
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Harp seals—named for the harp-shaped markings on the backs of the adults—are intensely social mammals, gathering in groups to give birth and nurse and much larger groups to migrate.
Seal pups are born with white fuzzy coats.
A pup's white fur helps it survive on the ice, capturing the warmth of sunlight and insulating skin.
While nursing her pups, a mother seal doesn't eat, and drops more than a quarter of her weight to nourish her pups quickly in their harsh icy habitat.
After about 12 days, a mother seal will decide it’s time for her pup to be on his own. She will abruptly stop feeding him and leave him to fend for himself.
Once their mothers have left, seal pups lie in large groups on the ice, where they will stay until it breaks up. At first, they cry out for their mothers, but they eventually adapt, learning to swim and eat on their own.
Read more about harp seals |
The baby seals' eerie absence was unexpectedly also felt in the north, where solid ice floes were also in bad condition. Instead of the tens of thousands of pups that should have been there, there were empty, broken ice floes as far as observers could see.
"We flew grid patterns in three helicopters across the whole of the northern Gulf for an entire day. We saw literally hundreds of miles of ocean and not a single seal or sealing boat," Aldworth reported on April 4.
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| The HSUS |
Sealers load the body of a seal pup onto their
boat to skin for her fur April 5. |
The sealers can continue killing the small pockets of seals they find for several more days in the northern Gulf. As soon as next week, sealers will be permitted to run their boats up the eastern coast of Labrador, killing hundreds of thousands more seals using the same methods.
Provided, that is, that they can find seals.
