Sortroom.net

Local residents and companies in the North Eastern Canadian provinces Tuesday began their annual cull of young seals - often born only days beforehand. With an estimated 300,000 to be harvested and skinned before the end of the season - 15th May, the Canadian government describes the seal population as “healthy and abundant”.

“It’s just horrific out there. There is blood all across the ice and seal carcasses as far as the eye can see,” Rebecca Aldworth, of the Humane Society of the United States

- The Guardian

The Canadian Marine Mammal Regulations, which govern the hunt, stipulate sealers may kill seals with wooden clubs, hakapiks (large ice-pick-like clubs) and guns. In the Gulf of St. Lawrence, clubs and hakapiks are the killing implement of choice, and in the Front, guns are more widely used.

It is important to note that each killing method is demonstrably cruel. Because sealers shoot at seals from moving boats, the pups are often only wounded. The main sealskin processing plant in Canada deducts $2 from the price they pay for the skins for each bullet hole they find—therefore sealers are loath to shoot seals more than once. As a result, wounded seals are left to suffer in agony—many slip beneath the surface of the water where they die slowly and are never recovered.

- Humane Society of the United States Website

Brigitte Bardot sums up her feeling over the lack of progress, despite campaigns to stop the hunt, in a message to Prime Minister Paul Martin and the federal fisheries minister: “You are jerks.”

Why we have to speak for them
Canadian seal pup hunt begins
HSUS Seal Hunt Facts
Letter to Canada’s National Post, supporting the hunt

UPDATE:My friend Rachel comes back at me with an email containing this thought that I hadn’t put clearly into words:

Here is a question: If Canada is a land of plenty, i.e. have a huge surplus of resources etc, then why is it suggested the people who live on the coast have to cull seals to make a living? Simply sticking to old traditions because they’re traditions doesn’t mean they’re appropriate for the modern world.