Sea of Slaughter (53 page)

In any event, the Norwegians arranged to rid themselves of these interlopers. They did this by the simple expedient of dropping the price of whitecoat pelts, of which they were the sole buyers. In 1967 they reduced the price to $6, which was intended to be low enough to prevent aircraft sealers from making a worthwhile profit. This did have some effect, but not as much as had been hoped for; so the report was circulated that the top price next year would be a mere $2. At that price, all but a handful of the aircraft hunters quit. However, after the 1968 ship/aircraft quota had been filled (mostly by the ships), the buyers began paying landsmen as much as $6 a sculp. That was the end of aircraft “participation in the seal harvest,” as a Charlottetown newspaper prettily put it.

My visit to the Gulf convinced me that, although the cruelty problem was real enough, the main issue was whether the ice seals could survive at all in the face of the enormous and virtually uncontrolled destruction they were suffering.

Robichaud had now given way to a new Fisheries Minister, the Honourable Jack Davis, a politician who was something of an anomaly since he was not wholly encapsulated within an impermeable membrane of preconvictions and prejudices. It seemed possible that he might be persuaded to reconsider the policies of his department toward the seals. I had some discussions about this with Robert Shaw, his Deputy Minister, who gave me grounds for hope. Early in 1969 I was told the Minister of Fisheries would take steps to halt the haemorrhage of the ice-seal nations, which had accounted for some 300,000 seals that spring.

Davis established an ad hoc seal advisory committee, and when this group confirmed to him that both harp and hood seal herds were in severe decline and urgently needed protection, he responded by proposing to prohibit the killing of any whitecoats at the Gulf in 1970 and by forging what he believed was a valid agreement with the Norwegian government to refrain from taking whitecoats at the Front.

Thereupon all hell broke loose.

Assailed by the sealing industry on the one hand and by politicians from the Atlantic Provinces on the other, Davis's position was undercut by his own senior civil servants and some of his scientific advisers. These sided with ICNAF (of which they were a part) in its refusal to countenance even a reduction, let alone a ban on whitecoat killing. The final blow came when Norway repudiated the agreement to prohibit its nationals from taking whitecoats at the Front. Backed into a corner, Davis withdrew his intended conservation measures and, as his Deputy Minister put it, “pulled back to lick his wounds.”

The 1970 slaughter took place as usual. The Gulf quota of 50,000 for large vessels remained unchanged and, in the absence of the airborne killers, was now filled in the main by the Norwegian interests. There were no quotas at the Front, and no restraint was exercised by ICNAF. There was, however, such a notable decline in seal numbers that the Norwegian fleet (which was now alone in those icy waters) could only manage to load 257,000 sculps of all ages and both species.

By now Brian Davies and his supporters were having such an inflammatory effect internationally, as well as in Canada, that they were disowned by the conservative wing of the animal protection movement. Undaunted, Davies (who had formed his own organization, the International Fund for Animal Welfare) redoubled his efforts to enlist world opinion against the ongoing slaughter. By mid-1970 he was having such success that the “seal affair” was becoming a matter of real embarrassment to Ottawa. At this juncture, the Department of Fisheries, which was naturally the chief target, was merged into the newly created and innocently named Department of the Environment, from which camouflaged retreat it issued a new set of Seal Protection Regulations.

Henceforward, no unauthorized aircraft would be permitted to fly lower than 2,000 feet above harp or hood seal whelping ice or to land within half a nautical mile of a breeding patch. This decree was later amended to make it illegal to land within that distance of any seal of either species during the whelping season. Spokesmen from the department explained that this cabinet order (it was never debated in Parliament) was intended not only to stop aerial hunting but to protect the seals from being disturbed by aircraft while whelping or nursing their offspring.

Although the uninitiated in Canada and abroad regarded this new regulation as highly laudable, it constituted a cynical deception. Aerial hunting had been defunct since 1968 and enjoyed no prospects of revival; in consequence, the only aircraft to visit the whelping ice were either those carrying government scientists and officially endorsed observers and Fisheries officers, or anti-hunt protesters, the press, and independent scientists and investigators. Those in the first category were authorized to “disturb the seals” where, when, and as they desired. In general, those in the second category were to be denied access, not only to the whelping patches, but effectively to the entire region, since single seals were to be found almost anywhere in the Gulf and at the Front.

In short, this despotic stricture was not designed to protect the seals, it was intended to protect the sealers (who, presumably, did not disturb the whitecoats or their mothers when bashing in their skulls), as well as the sealing industry and the government of Canada, by preventing the truth of what was happening on the ice from reaching the general public.

Oddly enough, the Minister of the Environment, as Jack Davis had now become, was not yet resigned to an acceptance of the political realities as defined by his own mandarins. In the same year that the new Seal Protection Regulations were promulgated, he formally established a House of Commons Advisory Committee on Seals and Sealing (COSS). In January of 1971, this group, which included two respected independent scientists, recommended to Parliament that the entire ice-seal hunt be phased out by no later than 1974 and that both harps and hoods then be given at least six years free from sealers to allow them to at least partially recoup their numbers. Davis agreed to implement these recommendations.

Much of what ensued thereafter in the murky bowels of Ottawa remains opaque. However, the outcome was crystal clear. A somewhat subdued Minister announced that, after all, Canada did not feel she could take unilateral action in what was clearly a matter of international commercial concern, therefore she would place the future of
all
harp and hood seals that frequented her waters in the hands of ICNAF; which was about the same as shifting it from the right hand to the left.

ICNAF, which had done nothing to conserve or protect either the Front herds or the dwindling remnants off the east Greenland coast, rose to the occasion by sonorously proclaiming a Harp and Hood Seal Protocol, under which it would establish an overall quota for western Atlantic seals. The quota would be determined on the basis of impeccable biological data and used as a tool for “scientific management,” not only to ensure that there would be no further depletion, but to restore the harps and hoods to something approaching their original abundance.

In 1971, ICNAF set its first Gulf/Front quota—200,000 harp seals for the ships and 45,000 for landsmen—a total just 18,000 short of the previous year's actual landings. By season's end in 1971, the sealers had landed 231,000, which was all they were able to get despite a massive effort to legitimize and sustain the quota by filling it. With their failure to do so, ICNAF had no alternative but to cut back. Thus the 1972 quota was reduced to 150,000. But all the sealers could kill and land that year was 136,000! They failed to fill it the next year, too.

Whitecoats were now in decreasing supply and increasing demand, so in 1974 the price went up to $12 a pelt. This incited the industry to add more ships and men and they managed to top the quota with 154,000. In 1975, whitecoat prices went wild, soaring to as high as $22; 180,000 ice seals were reportedly landed that year, including 15,400 hoods taken against a newly established hood quota of 15,000.

The year 1975 was also notable because of an aerial photographic survey that indicated the combined Gulf and Front adult harp seal populations now numbered no more than a million and, according to a paper by Dr. David Lavigne published by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, no more than 800,000 animals one year of age and older. Concern about these figures generated by conservation and anti-sealing organizations forced ICNAF to respond by significantly lowering the quota for 1976 to 127,000.

The sealing industry responded by ignoring the quota. The big-ship fleet, consisting of eight vessels sailing direct from Norway and seven of Karlsen's, took advantage of a second “good ice season” and, together with the landsmen, exceeded the quota by over 40,000. Needless to add, no punitive action of any kind was taken against them.

By now it was apparent to even the dullest intellect that ICNAF was the patsy of the Norwegian and Canadian sealing industries. Its major role was simply to deflect public outrage away from the governments of Canada and Norway, upon whom responsibility for reining in the industry and protecting the remaining seals properly rested.

Public outrage continued to rise. While Canadian and Norwegian governments, and the sealing industry, together did their worst to conceal the magnitude of the biocide being committed against the ice seals, their opponents were doing their best to bring it to public knowledge. One observer of the anti-sealers in action was Silver Don Cameron, contributing editor of
Weekend Magazine,
who went to the Front in the spring of 1976. Along with other journalists, he was a guest of Brian Davies, who had decided to challenge the Seal Protection Regulations. Cameron's account of the affair appeared in May, 1976, under the title “The Seal Hunt: A Morality Play.” I have condensed it.

“ ‘The helicopter regulations', one of Davies' people told me, ‘protect the seals by preventing those who would save them from landing within half a mile of seals which are being beaten to death.' Since no charter company would risk the seizure of a costly helicopter, the International Fund for Animal Welfare has had to buy one, and Davies has learned to fly it. His plan is to land [four other, chartered helicopters] safely distant from the hunt then ferry the passengers right into the killing ground in his Bell Jet Ranger. If he's impeded, he'll point out that he's a citizen of the United Kingdom as well as Canada, and that he's operating in international waters outside the twelve-mile limit—and thus outside the grasp of Canadian law.

“At 7.30 the golden light seeps westward over the frozen harbours and snowy woods. The choppers lift off and fly in formation north over the tiny fishing villages around this most northern finger of Newfoundland. Then we are over the ice, a stunning spectacle of rounded pans whirled in the tidal streams, pressure ridges where the ice has been raftered upon itself, ragged breaks and ‘leads' of open water skimmed by ice as filmy as plastic wrap.

“The morning is superb: bright, windless and sunny, even warm in the greenhouse of the helicopter I am in and Davies is flying. North of Belle Isle he dips down to look at two ships in the ice, but we see no seals. We fly on, our four other helicopters hanging like gigantic mosquitoes in the vast clarity of icefields and sky.

“Finally a trio of ships lifts over the horizon, widely scattered, barely visible one from the other. They are ‘in the fat', killing seals. The chartered helicopters set down, far from the nearest ship. Brian flies closer for a look at the hunt and we see down below the dark bodies of the mother seals, the squirming white forms of the pups, the streaks of red on the white ice near a ship.

“Brian sets us down perhaps 200 yards from the
Arctic Explorer
[one of Karlsen's ships] out of Halifax. The air is heavy with the cries of seals. Long red trails lead to the ship showing where loads of pelts have been winched aboard... And there's this mother seal 10 feet from me.

“She's rocking back and forth, all 300 lbs. of her, rhythmically lifting her mouth to the sky and keening. By her belly is a plum-coloured heap of meat, all that remains of her infant. As I watch her the crying ceases. She makes no further sound, though she seems to be trying. She rocks back and forth without pause.

“It's like a battlefield. As far as you can see the ice is splashed with blood. Whitecoats, still living, whose mothers have ducked into the water, cry aloud. On the horizon, in black silhouette, men are swinging clubs up and down in the white glare. Our party tramps over the ice, pausing to peer down a breathing-hole where a mother seal glides past with the elegance of a ballet dancer. The tiny carcasses of whitecoats, not much bigger than a good-sized roast once the fur and fat are taken, stare at us with bulging eyes protruding from heads smashed by sealers' clubs.

“Here and there a red flag flutters where a pile of sculps is being assembled. Four sealers are working this part of the patch. As they approach a whitecoat, the mother lunges at them once or twice, then slips into the water. The sealer raises a blood-soaked club about like a baseball bat. With a soft thump like a muffled drumbeat the bat crushes the seal's skull. Thick, crimson blood spouts from the whitecoat's eyes, mouth and nose. As the pup twitches and writhes to the dying jangle of its nervous system the sealer draws a long knife and a whetstone, and hones the steel.

“He makes a long cut from the chin down the belly to the hind flippers. The seal opens like an unzippered purse, its fat quivering like jelly, its inwards steaming in the cold.

“We walk toward a flag and happen on a truly horrible scene: a mother seal whose head has been smashed, whose snout has been driven sideways, and who is still alive, breathing shallowly through her battered face. The women with us scream; some burst into tears; others are enraged. They rush to nearby sealers.

“ ‘Put her down!' cries Lisa. ‘Put her out of her misery!'

“The sealers refuse. By law they are not permitted to kill adult seals this early in the hunt, though they may ‘defend' themselves if a mother interferes with their work. ‘Take the flagpole', one man tells Lisa. ‘Do it yourself.'