By Rebecca Aldworth

NEWFOUNDLAND—Tomorrow the commercial seal hunt will open again in the Front, the waters northeast of Newfoundland. At 6 a.m., sealers will begin to club and shoot to death every seal pup they find.

As of this writing, the sealing vessels had still not located any real concentration of seal pups. It’s not surprising—the ice cover in the Front is at the lowest since the 1960s, and many of the pups have probably already drowned as a result.

But the surviving seals’ good fortune will not hold out for long. There are already 200 large sealing vessels in position. The Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) expects the slaughter to be so massive that it plans to temporarily close the hunt in the Front tomorrow at 7 p.m., believing that the entire larger vessel quota of more than 110,000 seals (there is a separate quota for the boats smaller than 35 feet) will be killed in less than 13 hours.

If the DFO is right, at least two seals will die every second of the day tomorrow.

No More Secrets

The Front is the part of the hunt that goes on in secret. It normally occurs too far offshore for observers to reach by helicopter, which prevents us from recording the brutality that goes on there. For the same reason, this part of the hunt is almost entirely unmonitored by the Canadian government.

But the secret may soon be revealed. This year, the ice clung to shorelines, and our helicopters may be able to reach the sealing boats. If we are successful tomorrow, we will obtain the first film of the hunt in the Front in two decades.

This is vital to our campaign. The Canadian government tries to convince the public that almost all the seals killed in the Front are shot and that they die quickly and relatively painlessly. But we know nothing could be further from the truth.

Sealers shoot at seals from moving boats, often only wounding the pups with the first bullet. But the sealers are loathe to shoot the seals twice—the processing plants cut the price paid for seal skins for each bullet hole they find. I’ve watched this hunt from planes, and I’ve seen seals often left to suffer as they die slowly. I’ve seen sealers pull wounded seals onto sealing boats with long wooden boathooks, drag the struggling bodies on board, then skin the still flailing animals. Then they casually toss the bloody carcasses overboard.

Those thousands of dead will share the waters of the Front with other, uncounted, casualties. Even the Canadian government admits that more than 10,000 of the seals who are shot this year will be wounded, escape beneath the surface of the water, and then slowly bleed to death. Their bodies will not be recovered.

A Fellowship of Witnesses

I am disconsolate that I will not to be able to go to the ice in person. Each year, for so many years, I have stood with the seals as this unthinkable tragedy unfolds. But, in a calculated move, the Canadian government has barred me and several of my colleagues from the ice by refusing to issue us observation permits. Government officials obviously thought they could prevent The Humane Society of the United States from filming this hunt. They were wrong.

I am very proud that The HSUS and our friends at the Franz Weber Foundation, who are our partners in observing the hunt at the Front, are here to bear witness to this atrocity. Our team of observers are ready to go out and record the cruelty that the Canadian government and the sealers don't want anyone to see. Tomorrow will be tremendously difficult for all concerned, and I am heartbroken that our campaign has not yet been able to put a stop to this hunt.

But as I watch Vera Weber, the daughter of Franz and Judith Weber, setting off in a helicopter for the ice floes, I am reminded of the persistence and resilience of our movement.

It was Franz Weber who visited the ice floes in the Front in the 1970s—when it was still legal to kill seal pups less than 12 days old—proposing economic alternatives to the seal hunt for Newfoundland. Now, 30 years later, his daughter is here—ready and willing to take up the fight.

Today we have a new kind of sealing industry to deal with—one that is larger, wealthier, and more sophisticated than the one we took on in the 1980s. But we are far stronger too—and The HSUS and our partners around the world will keep campaigning until this cruel and needless slaughter ends for good.

Rebecca Aldworth is Director of Canadian Wildlife Issues for The HSUS.