March 25, 2006

By Rebecca Aldworth

Today the commercial seal hunt began in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

Last night The HSUS team left Nova Scotia on a 120-foot ice-class vessel outfitted with two smaller inflatable boats, seeking the seal hunters. As we pulled out of the port, it became clear that the Gulf ice had pushed into the narrow harbor, blocking us in. A very tense few hours ensued, as our captain navigated us through pans of crushed ice and the team struggled to sleep during the night, jarred awake often by the sounds of our boat crashing into ice.

This morning I awoke at daybreak, just one hour from St. Paul’s Island, north of Cape Breton. We searched for the next few hours for sealing boats, having heard from an earlier reconnaissance flight that they would be in the area.

Then I glimpsed sealing vessels in the distance, looking, as they always do to me, like black flies dotted across the horizon—an unwelcome intrusion into this place that has become my second home.

We also spotted baby seals—just a few of them—clinging to tiny pans of ice barely large enough to support their weight. They were so young, most of them whitecoats just a few days old and ragged jackets, just days older. They looked so helpless out on the ice.

As we neared a group of several sealing boats, we heard gunshots. We quickly deployed the small boats to investigate. This is the first time the ProtectSeals team has ever used small boats to access the hunt area, and we know it will be dangerous. As I climbed into the small boat, I paused for a moment to measure the mood of those with me. But as I looked at their faces, I saw nothing but a commitment to documenting this hunt. Andrew and Dan, our inflatable boat operators, steered us away from our larger vessel.

We sped as fast as we could towards two sealing vessels. Immediately, we spotted a seal carcass—not discarded on the ice as I’m used to seeing but left to rot in the ocean. The seal’s blood colored the surrounding water; her glassy eyes stared up at me through a watery grave.

One of the reporters traveling with us asked how it felt to see this. I tried to come up with words adequate to express my emotions—a mixture of anger that these fishermen would ever consider killing these defenseless baby seals for something as trivial as a fur coat, and guilt that this seal died because our campaign couldn’t stop the hunt in time.

We followed the path of the sealing vessel, determined to film the next kill. Blood streaked the ice floes that nearly blocked our path. Still we pushed through in our small boats.

Suddenly, the sealing vessel turned and motored towards us at high speed. We desperately tried to turn our boats around quickly enough to get out of its path. The sealing boat narrowly missed us. As we were tossed in its wake, a sealer threw part of a seal carcass into one of our boats.

This behavior is nothing new; it is the way sealers react to our presence every year. They know, as we do, that the images we film each year are closing global markets for seal products.

We turned to find another group of sealers to film, letting our larger vessel break the ice before us as we neared a spot we’d been told would contain sealing boats. Soon after, a boat came our way, bearing down on a single seal on an ice floe between us.

The sealing vessel stopped; clearly, the sealers were nervous about killing this baby seal in front of our cameras. This pup was a very young ragged jacket—probably no more than three weeks—and very playful. He moved toward us, making those soft baby seal cries so familiar to me. At another time, this would have been enchanting, but all we could feel was horror as we looked past him at the sealer behind him, rifle poised. 

But suddenly the gun was lowered, and the sealing boat began to back away. In a moment of exultation, we realized that, though we had made no move to stop the killing, our presence had just saved the life of this baby seal. As we sped after the sealing vessel, I turned to watch him moving around securely on his ice flow—for once, nature was being left as it should be.

Unfortunately, other pups were soon to die. The sealers tried to shield their actions, positioning their vessel between us and the seals they were killing. But we pushed through the ice floes and managed to get close enough to film what they were doing. One sealer jumped over the side of the vessel onto the ice , clubbed a pup brutally on the skull, then hooked her and dragged her back to the boat for skinning.

A series of gunshots rang out, and the sealing vessel began to move away. At that moment, a Coast Guard ice breaker came onto the scene, and helicopters took off from its decks. Some sealers had become trapped in the ice and needed the Coast Guard to come rescue them. We backed away and proceeded to another sealing area.

After a full day of filming, we came across a fair-sized solid ice pan next to a smaller one, where a tiny ragged jacket lay. We climbed onto the pan and sat down in the setting sun, looking at her. This baby seal looked so innocent, her eyes shutting slowly as she drifted into sleep, not knowing that the humans near her might easily have been hunters. In that moment of peace, I vowed to this baby seal that we would stop the hunt—that if she survived this slaughter she would never be at risk from hunters again.

As I write this, the sun has gone down, and we are preparing for another day of filming—because as long as we are here, documenting the brutality of this seal hunt, we know that we are doing everything possible to ensure this is the last one we will ever have to witness.