Common sense has no place in this debate.Cod are endangered, seals are not.The reality is that this is a GREAT fundraising issue for Greenpeace which has lost it's soul over the years. It's all about money and who has the most,wins.

The article is pretty benign, not seeming to take "sides" in the stupid anti-sealing campaign by vegetarians who want to ban all meat-eating...

A couple of points here: the first photo is sealers killing an animal with a hakapik, which represents less than 5% of the dispatching of seals, with over 95% of the commercial hunt being carried out with high-powered hunting rifles... but that is not gory enough for the protesters.

The images of "white baby seals" being killed are lies being promulgated by the anti-sealing "animal rights" industry. Whitecoats (as they are called) have not been hunted for over 2 decades and killing them would land you in jail... but somehow, that image sells better for PETA, HSUS, and others.

I will also mention that the seals are not "endangered", and inrealty their population boom has led to allowable catche of 400,000 animals last year, and this number continues to grow because of a massive over-population of the animals... the comment about "recent years" is true, but barely... in reality, until the european ban the catch was well over 200,000 animals annually and the seal herd population continued to grow year over year... we are now talking about a cull of the herd for population control = killing hundreds of thousands of animals and letting their corpses rot rather than having a small industry with some benefits for the sealers!

@Tiger of BC- I doubt I can convince you of anything, but there have been several veternary studies that have catagorically denied the "skinned alive" myth. Neither are white coat seals killed. None have been killed since the white coat hunt was banned back in the 1970's.

The seal hunt isn't pretty by any means, but the inside of an abatoir isn't pretty either. So, here's a question: Why is it that working in an abatoir is an honest living, when risking your life on the North Atlantic is a national disgrace?

Why is it ok to keep cows, chickens and pigs in terrible conditions, taking them from their mothers, keep them in tiny pens where they'll never see sunlight or breath fresh air (pigs), feed them with growth hormone enriched feed making them grow so fast that their leg bones can't keep up with their growing weight and snap underneath them (chickens and turkeys).

Seals, which helped decimate one of the richest fishing grounds on the planet, live free. Every part of the animal except the internal organs can be eaten by people, the skin is beautiful, warm and waterproof. There are million upon millions of seals. The hakapic has/is being replaced by guns. So, why cows, pigs, chickens and turkeys and not seals?

The seal hunt is a dying industry. The statements that "the market is there" disregard the fact that the citizens in the hypothetical market countries successfully petitioned their respective governments to ban the product, thus destroying the market. Better to recognize that the seal hunt is not economically productive, probably never will be again, and move on to more productive efforts that don't involve harvesting seals.

The sooner this national disgrace ends, the better. TImes are changing and this kind of stuff is just not okay anymore.

Finding and skinning baby animals alive is no way to make an honest living, sorry; I didn`t make it that way, but I`m okay with it.

I`m absolutely convinced our great nation can manage to find a way to help ends meet for the relatively few families that have no other skills that they can rely on to support themselves.

Hopefully the sealers will find some way to make ends meet. It will me a slim year for a lot of families.