By Tim Carman
THE GULF OF ST. LAWRENCE, April 1, 2005—The sealer turned to us, hakapik in hand, and spat out his words in a nasal, high-pitched voice drenched with a Newfoundland accent. Sealing, he shouted in between profanity-laced directives, is our tradition. He cursed that our Seal Watch team had no right to take away this tradition, or even to observe him, as he crushed one seal pup skull after another, leaving each animal to perform a sort of death dance in a puddle of its own blood.
If this is a tradition, I thought, it is an unthinking and uncritical one.
Minutes before this confrontation, our team had landed on an ice pan littered with seal carcasses, hundreds of them, each tossed aside like gum wrappers. The hunters had sliced from each animal the only part of value to them: the pelt. The rains and gale-force winds from the previous two days had frozen the skinned seals in place, an open-air morgue in which the Gulf's temporary ice floes served as an ignominious cooler.
Former hunter Michael J. Dwyer, in his 1999 book, Over the Side, Mickey, claims that it takes an experienced sealer "about two minutes" to skin a harp seal beater. Dwyer writes: "It involves three shifts around the profusely bleeding body. It involves placing one's face into the cloud of pungent, warm steam that rises from the blood-dripping conglomerate of entrails that could weigh sixty repulsive pounds. It involves grabbing the black, warm, twitching carcass, lifting it and tossing it down in the swath."
Assuming they were an experienced team of hunters, the group probably spent ten hours skinning the 300-plus seals on this pan. To put this in business terms, it took one eight-hour day, plus two hours of overtime, to transform these shimmering, silver-and-black beaters into the slabs of raw flesh now locked into place by the ice, soon to be lost forever to the sea.
When alive, every harp seal has a unique personality, but on this floating cemetery, all had been reduced to identical, oblong carcasses—blackened, crimson-streaked flesh and ivory fat, entrails spilling from beneath their rib cages like bloated, three-day-old noodles. The only thing that differentiated one carcass from another was the degree to which the seal's skull has been crushed.
Some seal pup heads were missing only a small chunk of skull, as if a veterinarian had removed it to slice out a tumor. But others barely had any skull at all; their heads literally looked like they had exploded. These differences in cranial damage served as a reminder of both the brute force of the hakapik and the widely varying skills of those who actually brandish these crude instruments. How many glancing blows to the head were deemed sufficient by sealers as they pulled out their skinning knives? Our team watched one seal today literally being skinned alive.
A skinned seal is difficult to look at for many reasons. Chief among them: The eyeballs remain in the carcasses. Everywhere we looked, soft, black-and-white globes peered back at us, crazy eight balls popping out of fleshy, partially intact skulls. An HSUS videographer and I had the same reaction to these dead faces: They looked like special effects props from a horror movie.
Except, of course, this was no movie. Unless you thought about it in the Clockwork Orange sense: What we saw was pure horrorshow, the aftermath of sealers who seem to go about their vicious work with the pleasure and nonchalance of the teenage droogs in Anthony Burgess' 1963 novel.
Did these hunters check their brains and hearts at the boat deck? I could think of no other reason why these hunters could kill, skin, and discard 300 beautiful beaters. Even just one moment of reflection, a single pause to think what it means to slice open a warm blubbery seal like a loaf of bread, and they'd have to realize they were standing in the middle of a real-life horror flick.
But sealing is tradition, and like most traditions, it goes unquestioned by those who practice it. The very nature of tradition implies a lack of critical analysis. This is tradition. It's what we've always done.
Tradition In Full Swing
Our two rented helicopters landed on a stretch of ice that resembled concrete after an 8.4 quake. Giant blocks of ice jutted from the pans at every conceivable angle, each one lacquered with frozen rainwater. The conditions, needless to say, made traversing the ice like trying to climb up a slide dripping with cooking oil. Even with spiky crampons buckled to our boots we found it challenging to catch up with sealers as they raced about the ice.
But we did meet up with the aforementioned Newfoundlander, who was none too pleased that we decided to turn our attention to his activities. He tried to skip to ice pans that required an even further hike on our part, but we relentlessly pursued him, digital cameras, tripods, and video equipment in tow. We observed him beat several seals to death, their blood occasionally spraying his pants legs after each swing, but he quickly grew weary of our presence. Several times he dropped his hakapik to his side in disgust and sighed deeply, as if our cameras were the real problem here.
Then he uttered what we had half expected from the moment we started to chase him: If you don't leave, he squeaked, I'm going to break your legs.
We took the threat seriously. After all, just the day before, anti-sealing activist Paul Watson claimed that a crew member on his ship, the Farley Mowat, was "smashed in the face and injured" by sealers. Our team leader, Rebecca Aldworth, had warned us that sealers were in no mood to play nice with observers. All the signs pointed to further conflict.
The threat turned into action within minutes. The sealer marched toward us methodically, purposefully, each quick step in our direction raising our adrenaline levels. His primary intent seemed clear—to hurt us or at least scare us—but his secondary goal may have been merely to prevent us from filming. He may also have been trying to crowd us, in order to make it appear as if we had violated the rule requiring observers to keep a ten-meter cushion between themselves and sealers. Violating this rule could lead the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans to revoke our license.
Our equipment, the busted-up pans, and our lack of familiarity with the ice hindered our escape. Finally, the sealer caught Andrew Plumbly, volunteer coordinator for the Seal Watch team and director of Global Action Network. Trapped by a pressure ridge that prevented him from retreating any farther, Plumbly was forced to stand toe to toe with the sealer who, when he reached Plumbly, raised his hakapik and twice demanded the camera in his hand. Plumbly flatly refused and added, in his impeccable South African lilt, that if the sealer hit him, he would face jail time under Canada's criminal codes. The sealer, spewing curses, backed down.
But only for a while. Within thirty minutes, he returned with a blood-splattered buddy, and they pursued us again. This time, they didn't stop until they had chased us back to our helicopter, a good quarter-mile away. Safely near our choppers, we watched the sealers make an abrupt right turn and focus their attention on a nearby pan, which was bereft of seals. A Canadian Coast Guard helicopter circled above us, surveying the unfolding scene.
As we stood by our helicopters and nervously recounted the events that had just transpired, the sealers strutted back past us, smug over their victory in sending us packing. With a hakapik slung over his shoulder, one of them mumbled, in a tone befitting South Park: Ha-ha, made you run.
That, I thought, is the level of unthinking, juvenile behavior we're dealing with at the seal hunt. Then I turned to some colleagues and said out loud, "Next you thing you know, they're going to moon us." We all laughed.
Later that afternoon, another sealer pulled down his pants and mooned the team.
Tim Carman is managing editor of hsus.org.
