For the most part, sealers are the only ones who see the horrors of Canada's seal hunt. And that makes it easier for the Canadian government to maintain the fallacy that it is a humane hunt operated in accordance with the country's Marine Mammal Regulations. Rebecca Aldworth, The HSUS's Director of Canadian Wildlife Issues, has been traveling up to the ice for years to bear witness. She shares some of what she saw in her last two years of documenting the hunt:
2003: "We saw 15 sealing boats formed in a large circle about one mile apart from each other. We landed in the middle and set off on foot. The sealers were on snowmobiles, so it was hard to keep up with them. But we ran as fast as we could, and we did catch up. Because of new regulations, we were able to get closer to the sealers than ever before. We were just 15 meters away, and we filmed everything.
"The sealers were running across the ice, clubbing each baby seal once on the head—not to kill it, just to immobilize it. Then they would go back and club a seal once or twice on the head. They would begin to cut the animal open, and it would begin to struggle. The sealer would club it again, and start cutting again. Again the seal would start to struggle. It was horrific.
"The Marine Mammal Regulations state that sealers must perform a simple test called a 'blink reflex' to see if the seal is still alive before they skin it. All it involves is touching the seal's eyeball. If the seal blinks, it is still alive. Not much work to ensure you don't skin an animal alive. But I have yet to see a sealer perform it."
2004: "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's 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."
