Sea of Slaughter (54 page)

“A Fisheries helicopter clatters down. Lisa rushes to it, waving her arms at the Protection officer. ‘There's a mother seal...'

“‘I can't do anything about it', says the officer. ‘I have no weapons. I'm not a doctor.' He goes and looks, then flies away. Nothing can be done. We pursue the hunters, leaving the seal in her agony.

“What we're watching is comparable to killing kittens with claw hammers; it can't be called a ‘hunt'. The day almost mocks the activity below, with the floes jammed solidly together and the sun bright and warm. As sheer spectacle, the seal herd is unforgettable: pups and mothers tucked in every nook and cranny of the ice as far as you can see. Black, sleek heads popping up in the leads and holes, inspecting the scene, then diving in unison. This endless wasteland teems with life.”

When Cameron's group returned to the land that evening, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police seized Davies' helicopter and he was charged with violating the Seal Protection Regulations. Two other helicopters belonging to the Greenpeace protest movement were also impounded. Following publication of Cameron's article, a new Minister of Fisheries, Rom
é
o LeBlanc, assured an interviewer that he was determined to uphold the law of the land and protect the seals. To ensure that these objectives were achieved, he planned to place the seal fishery completely out of bounds to any except legitimate sealers.

He was as good as his word. In June of 1977, a new Seal Protection Regulation was proclaimed making it an illegal act, subject to immediate arrest, for any person to interfere in any way with a seal hunter engaged in his proper business. It was also announced that Fisheries protection officers would henceforth be vested with the authority of peace officers and would be armed, to enable them to enforce the regulations.

In this same year, Canada proclaimed limited sovereignty over her surrounding seas to an offshore distance of 200 miles, which brought the entire western Atlantic ice-seal population, and of course the seal hunt, under her jurisdiction and made them subject to Canadian law.

Having reclaimed the seal “management” role, LeBlanc's department issued a statement explaining its intentions. “Canada's policy in seal management is consistent with its policies in the management of other living marine resources—the resources are harvested in a humane fashion, at levels which will permit a continuing sustained yield, based upon sound conservation principles which ensure the survival of the stocks,
and which take into account the relationships among species as competitors, predators and prey.
” I have italicized that final phrase because it contains the first public intimation of the real, but covert policy the Fisheries department was pursuing in regard to seals. A veiled reference to this policy had appeared in a departmental publication the previous year. Written by M.C. Mercer, a senior Fisheries civil servant, it included this intimation of things to come: “An argument can be advanced from the fishing industry to reduce the population [of harp seals] to a low level.”

The covert policy, as opposed to the expressed intent, was in fact designed to reduce all species of seals inhabiting commercial fishing waters to relic levels.

We have already seen how it was and still is being applied to grey and harbour seals. In the case of harp and hood seals, the Department of Fisheries
deliberately
employed the sealing industry as the instrument with which to achieve its goal.

Not all the employees of the department were in support. One, who for obvious reasons does not wish to be identified, has this to say about it: “The Minister is usually just your average politician doing what his experts tell him, and whatever he thinks is expedient. It's the deputies and assistant deputies backed by subservient science that really produce the policy. Remember, this is
Fisheries,
and seals are nowhere as economic an asset to Canada compared to fish. You have to remember, too, that since the sixties, all the important western Atlantic fisheries have been commercially depleted at such a considerable rate that natural recruitment can't keep up, and all the main stocks are going down.

“Fish processors and provincial government people in the Maritimes have been yelling blue murder for quite a while, and blaming federal incompetence for the decline. They had to be cooled out, but there was no way we could reduce the Canadian catch level without getting into worse trouble. For a while, we blamed the Russians and the East Bloc fishing fleets, but after we put in the 200-mile limit, that wouldn't wash.

“That's where the seals came in. We'd been dumping on seals for so long, in connection with salmon and herring, that maybe some of us had begun to believe they really were major culprits. Anyhow, it wasn't hard to make them look that way. They were a good thing to go for because nobody much gave a damn about them until Brian Davies began to stir things up. For LeBlanc, it was kind of Hobson's choice. If he didn't convince the fish people he was doing all he could to protect the fish stocks, he and the Liberal Party were in big trouble down east, which is where he comes from. But if he
did
convince them a war on seals was going to make a difference, he was going to get it in the neck from the conservationists.

“I guess he chose what looked like the lesser of two evils, figuring he could ride out any storm the anti-sealing crowd blew up, by letting the sealers carry the ball in public. Some of us weren't too happy about it, but what was there to do? It was the Minister's game, and we had to play it his way.”

I asked him whether the already grossly depleted seal population ever has been, or if it still remains, a factor in the decline of the fisheries.

“You can make a case for it if you juggle the data—cook the figures a bit. You can also make a case for putting birds on the hit list as a threat to civil aviation because they sometimes get sucked into jet engines. There's no solid proof seals ever were a major problem. In fact, there's good evidence that, as an integral part of the marine biota, their presence is important to the successful propagation of a number of commercial fish species. Look at it this way: in the nineteenth century, over twice as much cod was being landed, even with old-fashioned methods, as we can get now. And there were millions of seals out there then.”

The expectation that a policy of extirpation would succeed was buoyed by departmental studies that showed pup production of western Atlantic harps to have sunk below 230,000. This meant that reproductively active females no longer numbered much more than 250,000. If reinforcement or replacement of this breeding pool could be prevented by the annual extermination of most pups and beaters, then, when the current adult female population ceased to be productive, the harp seal nation would collapse into virtual extinction. Some experts predicted that this “final solution” could be achieved as early as 1985—
providing
that the sealing industry continued to perform its exterminator role.

This could only be ensured if a profitable market for seal products could be maintained. And here was the rub, because the anti-sealing movement was campaigning internationally (and with increasing success) for a boycott of those very products, particularly whitecoat fur.

As we have seen, LeBlanc and his predecessors had sought to deal with the protest movement by imposing arbitrary regulations intended to quarantine and sanitize the slaughter. Now Fisheries engaged in a massive, publicly funded campaign to discredit the actions and debase the motives of the protesters, at the same time aiming to convince the world that the seal pup “harvest” was a humane, properly managed, and legitimate use of a “sustainable natural resource.”

Under cover of this propaganda barrage, LeBlanc's department, making its first “management” decision since resuming direct jurisdiction over the seals,
raised
the quota from ICNAF's 127,000 of 1976—to 170,000 for 1977. (Remember, these are landings, not the actual number of seals destroyed.) This decision was made in defiance of the recommendation of Parliament's Advisory Committee on Seals and Sealing, which maintained that 140,000 was the absolute maximum the harp seal population could endure.

Although reported landings of 155,143 that year seemed to confirm the COSS judgement, LeBlanc nevertheless again raised the quota, to 180,000 for 1978, nor was he deterred when in both that and the following year the sealers failed to pass the 160,000 mark. In 1980 they did better, with 172,000. Most of these “harvests,” be it noted, were composed of harp seal pups.

The size of this last catch did not indicate an increasing seal population, as Fisheries and Oceans and the newly formed North Atlantic Fisheries Organization (a reincarnation of the now thoroughly discredited ICNAF) maintained. It was due to increased hunting pressure brought to bear through LeBlanc's department (which had also undergone a sea-change and was now grandiloquently called Fisheries and Oceans). Through the use of federal subsidies it had encouraged construction of scores of multi-purpose fishing boats with sealing capabilities. These brought many more Newfoundlanders, Madelinots, and northern Gulf coast fishermen into the offshore hunt, and so increased the kill. Government technical support of the sealing industry had also been much improved during the late seventies. New methods of ice-forecasting and reporting were being used, as well as aerial reconnaissance that pinpointed the location of every significant patch of ice seals and directed the sealers to them. And more Canadian Coast Guard and Fisheries patrol vessels were being assigned to assist the sealers.

Meantime, the Fisheries and Oceans contention that ice seals were becoming ever more numerous was being challenged. Early in 1979, two of the department's own senior research scientists, Dr. W.D. Bowen and Dr. D.E. Sergeant, complained that population estimates being used by NAFO (and by LeBlanc's mandarins) were unduly optimistic. In this same year, an independent study commissioned by the U.S. Marine Mammals Commission, employing Dr. John Beddington and H.A. Williams, experts in animal population dynamics at England's York University, was completed. The report concluded that ICNAF/NAFO scientists were consistently overestimating harp seal pup production by as much as a third!

The Fisheries and Oceans' response was to brazenly raise the quota yet again for 1980.

The extirpation program was proceeding on schedule, though not without furious opposition from the anti-sealing movement. While Brian Davies' organization remained at the forefront, the protest had by now been seconded by almost every major animal welfare group extant, but not, be it noted, by the Canadian Wildlife Federation, previously referred to in connection with the wolf. The CWF publicly supported the sealing industry. More and more concerned scientists, appalled at the liberties NAFO and Fisheries and Oceans were taking with scientific methods and principles, were adding their voices to what was fast becoming a thunder of dissent.

Toward the end of 1980, LeBlanc seems to have realized that the protest movement could neither be suppressed nor contained and that it might eventually succeed in bringing about an end to sealing in Canadian waters. Concrete evidence of its effectiveness was already at hand in the form of a sharp decline in the demand for sealskin products on European markets due to the adverse publicity sealing was receiving there. Even on the home front, informal polls showed that at least half of all Canadians were now opposed to the annual slaughter.

Considering these circumstances, LeBlanc and his bureaucrats determined to make the best use of what time remained. In 1981, Fisheries and Oceans unleashed what amounted to total war against the ice seals.

NAFO's and the department's creative statisticians (they were really one and the same) outdid themselves by producing figures suggesting that, despite the enormous destruction of recent years, harp seal pup production had almost doubled to nearly half a million whitecoats annually. Release of these statistics was accompanied by dire prophecies of a “seal emergency” that could inflict crushing economic damage on the entire northwestern Atlantic fishery unless the seal explosion was contained. Drastic action was needed to forestall such a calamity.

It was forthcoming.

Although the NAFO quota for 1981 was set at the extremely generous figure of 183,000 for the Front and Gulf regions, the sealers perfectly understood that it would not be enforced. They were deliberately encouraged to “go for broke.” Norwegians and Canadians alike extended themselves to the limit to take advantage of this open-ended opportunity. As a result, they slaughtered well over a
quarter of a million
ice seals, most of which were pups. The official figure released by NAFO for catches by Norwegian and Canadian sealers in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and in Canadian-controlled waters off Newfoundland and Labrador was 201,162. However, Statistics Canada reported that, in 1981, Canada
alone
exported at least 224,000 seal pelts, the vast majority of which were from harp seals. Neither figure takes into account the number of seals killed and not recovered. The destruction was so massive that the Norwegian buyers were surfeited and subsequently had to dump at least 20,000 pelts. However, they suffered no financial loss thereby, having been “reimbursed” by the Canadian government. There is reason to believe that Fisheries and Oceans had, in fact, been subsidizing the industry in this way with taxpayers' money for several years, in effect guaranteeing payment for skins taken in excess of market needs.

This otherwise eminently successful “cull” was marred, from LeBlanc's point of view, when part of the Gulf whelping ice was gale-driven onto the beaches of a national park in Prince Edward Island. As the ice that bore the seal pups began to come ashore, Fisheries and Oceans officers hastily licensed about 200 local fishermen to go after them. Most of these men and youths had never killed or skinned a seal before, and the instructions given to them were rudimentary in the extreme. Before the guardians of law and order could cordon off the area and exclude media people and anti-sealing protesters, some of these were able to observe an effectively unregulated slaughter of whitecoats (including the skinning alive of pups) that amounted to outright massacre. When films of this atrocity appeared on television worldwide, the flames of protest mounted.