By Tim Carman
CHARLOTTETOWN, PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND—The narrow conference room in the Delta Prince Edward hotel in downtown Charlottetown has all the warmth of a motor vehicle registration office, and the two men sitting at a folding table on Monday afternoon, both representatives of Canada's Department of Fisheries and Oceans, don't look happy. Perhaps that's because of the people sitting in the chairs at their "press conference."
Most are representatives from animal protection organizations, including 10 staffers or freelancers associated with The HSUS.
The Canadian government and the animal activists are squaring off again over a familiar subject: the annual harp seal hunt, which this year will claim the lives of more than 300,000 baby seals on the ice floes in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. While this conference room showdown doesn't begin to compare to the anti-sealing movement's heyday in the 1970s, when a radical handcuffed himself to a pile of seal pelts as it was loaded onto a boat or when two daring souls blocked a massive icebreaking ship by literally standing in front of it, the scene does echo the past in one significant way:
The government sounds scared.
The press conference begins with a statement read, in French and English, by the "acting communications director for the Quebec region," who seems to be perspiring a lot and taking long pauses to gulp down water. His statement is a sort of DFO Greatest Hits package, stuffed with the same "facts" that DFO Minister Geoff Regan has been pushing to editorial boards across Canada.
In the weeks leading up to the hunt, Canadian officials have been asking citizens to swallow a load of seal meat (which the locals inform me smells and tastes absolutely awful). DFO officials have been telling people that the hunt can represent up to 25% of a sealer's annual income, that the hunt is conducted in a "safe and humane manner," that it is "sustainable and economically viable," that the harp seal population is "healthy and abundant, nearly triple what it was in the 1970s," that the hunt is "closely monitored and tightly regulated," and that seal pups are "self-reliant, independent animals."
Since the DFO's "facts" are apparently not enough to sway Canadians, Regan has also been amping up the rhetoric against animal protection organizations. He's preyed upon working-class anger over the collapse of the cod fisheries (and the widely debunked theory that the seals are eating all the fish and prohibiting a cod recovery) by boldly claiming that animal groups are trying to take away sealers' "time-honored traditions" for the purpose of lining their own pockets. Regan has even said that the Canadian seafood boycott, launched by the Protect Seals Network, "will do nothing to stop the seal hunt and will only serve to add to the level of unemployment in an area already suffering economic hardship."
Setting the Record Straight
Monday's press conference provides some of those same animal groups with an unexpected chance to return fire at the DFO in what has become the most heated media debate in recent seal hunt history. The conference room is equipped with a microphone stand and a small patch of carpet where attendees—clearly the DFO had hoped for journalists, not animal advocates—can ask their questions. But when Rebecca Aldworth, The HSUS director of Canadian Wildlife Issues, steps up to the microphone, the area quickly turns into a pulpit. And she's not afraid to play the bully.
"I have just a couple of questions," Aldworth addresses Roger Simon, area director for the DFO, who handles all the inquiries during the press conference. "My first one is, Why is the Canadian government acting as spokesperson for an industry? As a Canadian I find it pretty reprehensible that Canada's logo, if you will, is sitting all over a press packet that contains a lot of misinformation. You say here that you encourage the public to base their opinions on fact, but you don't give them the facts. What you give them is a PR spin for [the sealing] industry."
Aldworth actually has several questions, each of which is designed to force the DFO to modify its "facts." First off, she wants the DFO to admit that the current harp seal population—agency officials love to spout that the estimated 5.2 million seals is "nearly triple what it was in the 1970s"—represents a recovery from an all-time population low, not an explosion of harp seals suddenly in need of a cull. Second, she wants the DFO to say, on the record, that its enforcement officers will strictly enforce the marine mammal regulations, particularly those on humane killing, and not just harass observers about their permits. And, finally, she wants the DFO to admit that the Canadian government provides subsidies to sealers, which officials routinely deny, including breaking the ice for sealers with Coast Guard ships.
Simon is masterful at deflecting the questions. He's clearly studied top industry and government evasion tactics; he could stay on message while being swarmed by grasshoppers. Aldworth coaxes hardly any admissions from him, though Simon does seem resigned to admit that Canadian grants to the sealing industry are "subsidies."
Simon only trips once, and he's clearly not aware of it. When a Dutch journalist asks him to comment on a potential ban of seal products in Holland and the larger European Union, Simon smugly responds that most seal products are exported to Asia and Russia. "I don't think the Dutch market is much of a major player in the seal industry."
But when he is asked to comment on Legal Sea Food's decision not to purchase fish from Newfoundland until the seal hunt is stopped—or to comment on the 96,000 people who have signed The HSUS's boycott of Canadian seafood —Simon suddenly clams up. He says he doesn't comment on "trade matters."
His newfound reticence speaks volumes: The Canadian government is apparently scared about losing any part of its multi-billion dollar export business in seafood. After all, Canada's beef industry has already been crippled by a U.S. ban on its products.
Where the Rhetoric Meets the Ice
The day after the press conference—the opening day of the 2005 hunt—the HSUS team watches dozen of those "self-reliant, independent seals" lie there helplessly as sealers crush their skulls with hakapiks. Many of these baby seals have not yet learned to swim, a fact that makes a mockery of the DFO's carefully selected words about their self-reliance and independence. Even calling this a hunt seems perverse; it implies a chase, but as St. Johns writer Ray Guy noted in his 1999 article, "Seal Wars," "killing seals looks as challenging as stomping on snails on a garden path."
The ice pans in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, which the young seals call home until they're either killed or swim off to Greenland, is the place where rhetoric goes to die. Press statements, interviews, politicking, and spin control all have their place in the course of human events, but when you're staring at one severely injured seal pup who's desperately trying to keep his nose above water because he knows he'll drown if he doesn't, all those words seem as empty as this ice.
It may not be fashionable to be an American these days, but on Tuesday morning, as each swing of the hakapik found its intended target, I thanked the States for the Marine Mammal Protection Act. Passed in 1972, the Act is, as The HSUS's marine mammal scientist Naomi Rose says, a "model of precautionary management." It, she notes, "placed all marine mammals, regardless of whether or not they were endangered or threatened, under the Act's protection, because it was recognized that marine mammals are difficult to study and count and damage could be inflicted on populations long before it became obvious to researchers or managers."
That sounds like wisdom, not rhetoric.
Tim Carman is the managing editor of hsus.org.
