Sealers took to the thawing ice floes off the Atlantic Ocean on the first day of Canada's contentious seal hunt on Saturday, sparking confrontations with animal rights activists who claim the annual cull is cruel.
Protesters had to dodge flying seal guts pitched at them by angry hunters as tempers flared on the first day of the spring leg of the world's largest seal slaughter. Reporters and animal rights activists tried to get as close as permitted to the hunt on the Gulf of St. Lawrence, but their presence infuriated sealers hunting for scarce animals on small, drifting ice pans.
At one point, a sealing vessel charged up to a small inflatable Zodiac boat carrying protesters, and a fisherman flung seal intestines at the observers.
PHOTO: AP
"They threw carcasses at our Zodiac and they came rushing at us in their boat and tried to capsize us in the wake," Rebecca Aldworth of the Humane Society said. "This is standard behavior out here; the sealers feel that they're completely above the law."
The fishermen in the isolated island communities of Quebec and Newfoundland say the hunt supplements their meager winter incomes, particularly since cod stocks have dwindled dramatically during the past decade. They resent animal-rights activists, who they say have little understanding of their centuries-old traditions.
The hunt brought C$16.5 million (US$14.5 million) in revenue last year, after some 325,000 seals were slaughtered. Fishermen are able to sell their pelts, mostly for the fashion industry in Norway, Russia and China, as well as blubber for oil, earning about C$70 per seal.
The federal government maintains Canada's seal population is abundant, with a population of nearly 6 million in the Arctic north and maritime provinces.
Regulations require the sealers to quickly kill the seals with a pick or bullet to the brain. The pups also must be over two to three weeks old and have shed their white downy fur before being killed.
Mark Small, president of the Northeast Coast Sealers Coop, has been sealing off Newfoundland for about 40 years. He said the activists don't understand how important the hunt is to the family fishermen in Atlantic Canada.
"I think the Canadian public realizes these are coastal people who live off the sea and depend on the hunt to survive in small communities where the fish stocks are not there," Small said. "Coastal communities have to live, too."
Animal-rights activists claim the fishermen often skin the seals alive or leave some pups to die if they are not immediately knocked unconscious.
The Humane Society has had high-profile allies in celebrities like Paul McCartney and his wife, Heather Mills McCartney, who traveled to the Gulf of St. Lawrence two weeks ago to pose with the newborn pups. The McCartneys said in a video message from London on the eve of the hunt's opening that Canada could "gracefully" exit from the slaughter by offering a license buy-back program to sealers.
French film legend Brigitte Bardot came to Ottawa earlier this week. She said she was stunned that a developed nation would still let such a practice continue, three decades after she first came to Canada to frolic with some pups in an attempt to end the slaughter.
The unseasonably mild recent temperatures in the Gulf of St. Lawrence have made the ice thin and many of the harp seal pups appear to have drowned, prompting protesters to call for the quota of 325,000 kills to be lowered to compensate for the natural deaths.
Veteran animal-rights activist John Grandy, on board a plane chartered by the Humane Society to monitor the hunt and report any abuses, also said much fewer pups were on the ice this year.
Roger Simon, spokesman for the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans, disputed concerns about a high natural seal mortality this year.
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