On October 23, 2012, the Standing Senate Committee on Fisheries and Oceans tabled a report recommending the removal of grey seals in order to aid the recovery of cod and other groundfish stocks.
This study was expected since we are currently facing a serious problem: the risk of cod disappearing forever from our planet. Other species -- plaice, winter skate and white hake -- are also at varying degrees of risk.
After hearing from scientists, sealers, and animal welfare groups, my colleagues on the committee and I are convinced that grey seals, whose population has grown considerably, are one of the factors -- but not the only factor -- preventing cod stock recovery. We, therefore, recommended that the government remove 15,000 grey seals a year for four years out of a total population of 330,000 to 410,000 animals. Removal must be done humanely by experienced professionals under scientific supervision. In addition, the Liberal members on the committee insisted that the government develop a market for seal-derived products.
Obviously, this news provoked vegetarian lobby groups who advocate against the seal hunt -- indeed, all hunting, fishing and everything and anything remotely related to animals.
Their main argument is that there is no market for seal-derived products. Yet it would be entirely different if these lobby groups didn't do everything in their power to close these markets, because these markets do exist! These groups lobbied European parliamentarians and won a boycott on Canadian seal products in 2009. And when Canada announced in 2011 that it had entered into an agreement with China to sell its products from the seal hunt, the lobbyists mobilized no fewer than 50 organizations to derail the agreement.
Again, under pressure from these groups, the Russian government declared a boycott of Canadian seal pelts in 2011. Yet the Russian government, by announcing in February 2012 that canned seal meat could be sold in Russian supermarkets, proved that a market for seal-derived products does exist! Moreover, this market is so successful that Canadian products were exported to 35 countries between 2005 and 2011, bringing in US$70 million.
Do they believe that without a market there will be no seal harvest? Quite frankly, that is absurd! Scotland has managed its seal herds for decades by harvesting an annual quota. The fact that Europe, of which Scotland is a member, voted to boycott Canadian seal products hasn't stopped it from pursuing its own management. On March 15, 2012, the U.S. government lifted protection on sea lions in California to manage the herd threatening salmon stocks. Unfortunately, however, there is no market for seal or sea lion products in the United States, as it too has boycotted these products under pressure from vegetarian lobby groups.
So if closing markets does not protect animals, why shut them down? Simply to deal with powerful vegetarian lobby groups whose goal is to obtain a ban on animal-derived products with a bigger goal of a ban on all forms of hunting, fishing and livestock production, and, ultimately, making animal rights equal to human rights.
Morality: it is more ethical to humanely and sustainably harvest animals and subsequently market them, then it is to harvest them only to burn or let them rot. With or without a market, humans, who are part of the food chain, will always be predators and regulators -- unless humankind becomes vegetarian. This utopia which anti-seal-hunt lobbyists no doubt believe will happen one day comes at the cost of suffocating our regions by killing existing jobs and markets.
WARNING: GRAPHIC
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Canadian Seal Hunt
Seal hunters use a hakapik, a club used for killing seals, to kill a seal near their boat in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence March 31, 2008 near Charlottetown, Canada. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
Canadian Seal Hunt
Seal hunters skin harp seals on an ice floe March 30, 2001 in the Gulf of St. Lawrence in Canada. (Photo by Darren McCollester/Newsmakers)
Canadian Seal Hunt
The bodies of harp seals, roughly twenty days old, lie on an ice floe March 27, 2001 in the Gulf of St. Lawrence in Canada. (Photo by Darren McCollester/Newsmakers)
Canadian Seal Hunt
The carcass of a harp seal, roughly twenty days old, lies on an ice floe March 30, 2001 in the Gulf of St. Lawrence in Canada. (Photo by Darren McCollester/Newsmakers)
Canadian Seal Hunt
The carcass of a harp seal, roughly twenty days old, lies on an ice floe March 30, 2001 in the Gulf of St. Lawrence in Canada. (Photo by Darren McCollester/Newsmakers)
Canadian Seal Hunt
The carcass of a harp seal, roughly twenty days old, lies on an ice floe March 30, 2001 in the Gulf of St. Lawrence in Canada. (Photo by Darren McCollester/Newsmakers)
Canadian Seal Hunt
Seal hunters carry dead seals in their boat in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence March 31, 2008 near Charlottetown, Canada. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
Canadian Seal Hunt
A policeman tries to remove female animal-rights activist Ashley Fruno (R), covered with a body-painting to look like the Canadian flag, during her one-woman anti-sealing protest by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) outside the Canadian embassy in Tokyo on March 24, 2010. (TORU YAMANAKA/AFP/Getty Images)
Canadian Seal Hunt
Animal rights activists, Sir Paul McCartney(R) and then-wife Heather Mills McCartney get up close to a seal pup during a venture onto the ice floes of the Gulf of St-Lawrence before the start of the 2006 seal hunting season in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. (DAVID BOILY/AFP/Getty Images)
Canadian Seal Hunt
Members of the organization for the defense of animals AnimalNaturalis protest naked and painted as bloody seals to protest the seal hunt in Canada on March 15, 2010. (Getty)
Canadian Seal Hunt
Members of the organization for the defense of animals AnimalNaturalis protest naked and painted as bloody seals to protest against the seal hunt in Canada on March 15, 2010. (Getty)
Canadian Seal Hunt
Inuit hunter Pitseolak Alainga (L) explains how the Inuit traditionally hunt seal to Canada's Finance Minister Jim Flaherty outside the Nunavut Legislature in Iqaluit, Canada, February 6, 2010. (GEOFF ROBINS/AFP/Getty Images)
Canadian Seal Hunt
An animal-rights activist holds a baseball bat as he stands next to a person wearing a seal costume during a protest against the killing of seals in Canada on March 29, 2010 in Munich, Germany. (Photo by Miguel Villagran/Getty Images)
Canadian Seal Hunt
An animal-rights activist wears a mask depicting the face of a seal during a protest against the killing of seals in Canada on March 29, 2010 in Munich, Germany. (Photo by Miguel Villagran/Getty Images)
Canadian Seal Hunt
People protest in front of the Canadian Consulates, on March 25, 2009 in Nice, south eastern France, to protest against the seal hunt in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence in Canada. (VALERY HACHE/AFP/Getty Images)
Canadian Seal Hunt
Having recently returned from a trip out to the ice floes to collect seal heart valves for scientific research, local butcher and seal hunter, Rejean Vigneau (R) and AN employee (L) prepare seal meat in his meat shop on March 25, 2008 in the Magdalen Islands of Quebec, Canada. (DAVID BOILY/AFP/Getty Images)
Canadian Seal Hunt
The Grim Reaper clubs a mock seal to death during a protest by the animal rights group PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animlas) in Hong Kong, 21 April 2006. (MIKE CLARKE/AFP/Getty Images)
15,000 seals culled every year for the last 50+ years.
Their codstocks are better managed and thus more abundant than ours.
Yet our officials at DFO are loath to follow their lead.
A typicaly canadian solution to problem solving?
Ignore what's been works elsewhere.
The "main" argument from groups opposing the grey seal cull was not "that there is no market for seal-derived products" as Senator Hervieux-Payette falsely claims. Although, in fact, there is almost no market for seal products, and that fact was raised. The main arguments of the independent scientists and groups who appeared before the committee related to cruelty and that the scientific consensus was there was no scientific basis, whatsoever, to conclude that reducing grey seal numbers will aid in the recovery of cod.
The only rationale for slaughtering grey seals is as "political" killings to assuage the ignorant hatred that most fishermen and fishing companies have for marine mammals. The political seal killings will do nothing to help cod recover, and may--as the expert testimony showed--even impede recovery, but the slaughter will help political parties win seats in parts of Atlantic Canada. Killing seals is bad for fish, it's bad for fishermen, but it's good for politicians.
It's worth noting that as long as they're not being fished cod are recovering in many areas, despite large, and possibly growing, seal populations. The only way that has been shown to actually aid in the recovery of cod and other commercial fish species is to stop fishing them until they fully recover--something Canada has yet to do. Killing marine mammals has never been shown to work.
2 - The scientific validity of culling to improve cod stocks with no control over the other variables that affect fish stocks makes for poor science. So the culling 'experiment' is a no-go from a purely scientific perspective. (Please state the assumptions that will be used to address those other variables!)
3 - If the market were so great for seal products then why do other countries have such limited cull numbers? ('cuz we know if the market is good for something we humans tend to over-do it, not under-do.)
4 - We should stop pretending that seals are the reason for the cod fishery disappearing (that is still a big maybe) and recognize that sealing may be a replacement job to get $$ and seasonal employment numbers up. - Until we wipe out the seals then start pointing the finger at seal predators and start killing off orcas so that the seal population can recover.... Wow, does that sound familiar?)