By Tim Carman
THE GULF OF ST. LAWRENCE, April 4, 2005—The sealers pose the question frequently on the ice, but it's not a legitimate inquiry. It's a taunt, a jab, a sophomoric attempt to give us a different perspective on Canada's seal hunt.
We have a job to do here, they like to curse at our Seal Watch team. What the hell are you doing here?
Sometimes, during the course of this year's five-day hunt, which officially ended on Saturday night, I had to ask myself the same question. Observing grown men killing harp seals, over and over, would throw anyone into an existential crisis.
The rules of our observation permits are clear: You cannot interfere with the sealers during the hunt. You cannot scare away seals to prevent a hunter from killing them. You cannot rescue a seal who's injured. You cannot stand closer than ten meters to a hunter who's swinging his way across an ice pan, sending seal pups to a watery, premature grave.
All you can do is stand there and watch and record. Sometimes you can complain to officials of the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans, but that feels as useful as…well, as standing there helplessly and watching seals being clubbed to death.
When you first see a seal's skull crushed with a hakapik, you feel this anger wash over you. You curse out loud, to no one in particular, just because something inside you has to express something. The moment cannot pass without outrage—outrage over the killing itself, and outrage over the fact that you can do nothing to stop it in that moment.
Here's the typical process: Employing helicopters, observers of the seal hunt scout for boats first, then scout to find the nearest pan of ice with live seals on it. The goal is to scramble out of our choppers and set up recording equipment before the sealers arrive with their hakapiks. We typically beat them to the seals, and while that's good for documenting the horror of the hunt, it's awful for your psyche. You actually get to spend time with the seals, get to look them in the eye, get to see how playful and funny and serious they are. You open yourself up to their charms.
Five minutes later, those seals are dead. Two minutes after that, they are skinned of their fat and pelt, their purplish red muscles still twitching on the ice after the hunters have collected their prizes.
What the hell are we doing in the middle of the sea, this vast icy harp seal whelping ground that's so inhospitable to humans?
Who's the Boss?
The hunters, of course, act like the ice is their natural habitat, not the seals'. The irony of their territorialism is lost on them, despite the fact that the sealing industry has a long history of watching the sea swallow up its kind.
Our Seal Watch team visited the ice five times during the course of the 2005 hunt. Every time, except for the first trip when it was sleeting and windy and colder than a sealer's heart, we were confronted by hunters on the ice. Their tactics were so similar that Rebecca Aldworth, HSUS's director of Canadian Wildlife Issues, believed the sealers had purposely developed the strategy to intimidate and discourage observers.
Their tactics, in their uniformity and ubiquity, certainly smacked of strategy. One attack remains particularly vivid in my mind. Four of us had staked out a pan with three seals on it. We were perched on a pressure ridge, waiting for the sealers from the boat Manon Yvon to bring their destruction our way.
About an hour earlier, we had watched one of the Manon Yvon's hunters, a young muscled man with closely cropped hair, butcher seals with unusual gusto, his swings delivered with a vicious velocity as if to misdirect his anger at us onto the animal. Once he had slaughtered his way through a small pan of seals, Aldworth cried foul—literally. She called over officers from the DFO, and wanted the sealer's permit immediately yanked for violations of the marine mammal regulations. Specifically, she wanted it yanked for violating the rule that requires a sealer to perform either a skull palpitation or an eye-blink reflex test, to make sure the pup is dead, before moving on to the next one.
The DFO officers, who were about a quarter mile away on another ice pan, somehow determined from their far-off vantage point that the sealer had indeed conformed to the rules.
Aldworth's attempt to hold the sealer to the rules clearly didn't endear her to Manon Yvon's crew. And when the DFO (and the Coast Guard) finally left in their red-and-white chopper, we found ourselves alone with the sealers. And they were in no mood for rules.
They skipped right past those three seals we were staking out—and came after us. Eight sealers, each with a hakapik and a bad attitude, charged against four observers. We had only our wits to defend ourselves. The leader of this scalping party was an older man who shouted repeatedly, You have to be ten meters from me! You have to be ten meters from me! He knew full well that we couldn't maintain that cushion as he rushed toward us.
The sealers finally drove us, like cattle, to the other members of our team. The older sealer turned his attention to Aldworth, currently the most outspoken critic of the hunt, and let her know that he wasn't afraid to smack a woman. Aldworth said she didn't doubt that, and then added, quite motherly, "You have blood on your face." The altercation ended with the old sealer knocking Aldworth's camera out of her hand, smearing the instrument with seal blood in the process.
Other members of the Seal Watch were similarly pushed, swung at or poked with hakapiks. The encounter concluded with the older sealer confronting a young man in our party, sticking a gloved, blood-soaked finger in his face and asking, "You know what you look like? My h'ass."
By the time the Coast Guard landed, about five minutes later, the damage report read something like this: three cameras splattered with blood, three team members similarly bloodied, and everyone rattled. Aldworth filed a formal complaint with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and we spent the next hour or so giving statements—and not documenting the sealers.
I couldn't help but think that the sealers got the better of this deal; we were rendered useless as observers for more than two hours as the Dudley Do-rights who "enforce" the nominal regulations of the hunt pretended to care about humane issues.
So why do we do this? Why do we willfully subject ourselves to watching beautiful animals slaughtered—and to confronting sealers with hakapiks?
We kid ourselves that one of the main reasons is to document violations of the marine mammal regulations, but as Aldworth will tell you, documentation hasn't amounted to a hill of seal blubber. She has filed more than 660 probable violations with the DFO—none of which has translated into formal charges.
But here's the thing: If we weren't there, the harm to seals could be even worse. This is a difficult argument to make, because we can't exactly speak to something we will never witness, but we hear stories and we read reports. When observers aren't around, the brutality can be staggering. During the five days of this year's Gulf hunt, I could sense that our presence changed the sealers' behavior. They would administer eye-blink tests, or re-club still squirming seals to make sure they were dead. I imagined these acts—and sometimes their theatricality made them seem exactly like acting—were performed for our benefit, to show everyone that the hunt was "humane."
The real reason we do this, strange as it sounds, is for you. You, and millions like you, will be the force that finally pressures the Canadian government to stop this annual absurdity in harp seal management. And you can only apply that force when you know the facts, when you see the cruelty and the stupidity and the viciousness for yourself.
That's why we're there.
Tim Carman is managing editor of hsus.org.
