Every year Canada kills and skins hundreds of thousands of baby harp seals, leaving their bodies to rot. The seal cullers’ favoured tool is the vicious hakapik a long pole with a sharp spike intended to destroy the seal’s brain but which often fails to kill the animal, meaning it is skinned alive.
Why does Canada slaughter seals in such barbaric fashion?
The trade in seal skins generates relatively little revenue, $24 million a year, and the cost of the cull on far-flung ice floes freezing temperatures means it is barely profitable. In fact, the Canadian government has to assist the cull by using its icebreakers to clear seaways to make it worthwhile. Canadian fishermen claim that if there weren’t a cull the seals would eat too many of their fish, which makes you wonder what the seals survived on before the fishermen arrived. We are even told that if not for the cull over-population would see seals would starve to death; so much kinder to skin them alive.
Canada’s shame is that there is no good reason for the seal cull. Like Japan’s archaic whale-hunt, the seal cull is in reality nothing more than a testament to the power of lobby groups in important electorates and bloody-minded adherence to tradition. And like Japan, Canada’s otherwise spotless international reputation bares a bloody stain for it.
The EU is set to ban the import of seal products (most of the Canadian skins pass through Europe on the way to Russia and China). This may be the death-knell of the seal fur trade and the cull. For Canada’s sake, let’s hope it is.