Many Sea Shepherd supporters and people concerned about the killing of seals in Canada often ask us why we are not continuing to oppose the slaughter of harp seals in Canada? Some people have even accused us of abandoning the Canadian seals.
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It was evident that the protests were not making much of a difference. So in 1983 I brought the Sea Shepherd II to the coast of Newfoundland and blockaded the harbor for two week to not let the sealing ships out. I then moved to the Gulf of St, Lawrence and my crew and I escorted the sealing ships there out of the sealing grounds. Of course we were arrested and the Sea Shepherd II was seized but out of the quota set that year of 186,000 seals, the sealers killed 57,886. The European Union banned whitecoat pelts and for the first time in the history of the Canadian seal hunt the kill fell below 100,000 seals.
The whitecoat ban had an impact and it was not until 1996 that the kill numbers rose again above 100,000.
Between 1984 and 1995 the Canadian government quota remained at 186,000 seals every year. During that 12-year period Canada allowed for a kill of 2 million, 232 thousand seals. The actual kill during those 12 years was 615,000 or around a quarter of the total quota. The 1985 kill was only 19,035 of the quota of 185,000.
Why? Because there was no European Market. The seal hunt would not have survived without massive Canadian government subsidies.
Canada revived the commercial hunt in 1995 with a plan to kill six-week old seals and to label them adult seals. The kill numbers began to increase once again with 242,906 seals killed from a newly raised quota of 250,000 seals.
I returned to the seal slaughter with my ship Ocean Warrior in 1998 when the quota was set at 275,000 seals. Despite our efforts the kill went over quota to 282,624.
From 2003, the government continued to raise the quotas and we returned against in 2005 with the Farley Mowat when the quota was set at 319,500. Many of the Sea Shepherd crew were arrested that year for disrupting the slaughter but despite their efforts the kill was over the quota once again with 329,829.
In reviewing the campaigns it became very obvious that the only thing that made a difference was the market. Our interventions served to publicize the killing and the contradictions of the slaughter but our on-site efforts were made increasingly difficult by stronger legislation protecting the killing and labeled “The Seal Protection Act.”
So in 2008 we decided on a different tactic. With legislation before the European Union to ban all seal products, we sent in the Farley Mowat on a campaign to sacrifice the ship to gain maximum publicity in Europe. As a Canadian I did not skipper the vessel. In fact I stayed on shore. The command went to Captain Alex Cornelissen a citizen of the Netherlands and his First officer Peter Hammarstedt of Sweden. Most of the crew were European. We needed to make a media splash in Europe and having a ship crewed by Europeans arrested under the “Seal Protection Act” for the crime of witnessing a seal being killed was a strategy that served to contribute to the passing of the European legislation banning seal products from Canada.
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With the new ban on seal pelts the kill numbers began to fall again.
2009 – 74,581 seals killed
In response the Canadian raised the quota to 280,000
2010 – 67,327 seals killed.
In response to this the government raised the quota once again to 330,000
2011 – 37,609 seals killed
In response the Canadian government raised the quota to the ridiculous number of 400,000 and added more subsidies.
In 2012 – 69,175 killed
In 2013 – 90,318 killed
In 2014 -54,806 killed
None of the kill numbers from 2009 onward have even come close to the quotas set by the Canadian government.
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The success of a movement lies in diversity and over the years it has been a diversity of groups, conservation, animal welfare and animal rights working towards a common objective – the eradication of sealing.
Every campaign teaches us new directions. Canada has imposed Draconian regulations to prevent interference on the ice with the sealers. Fine, the confrontations of the past paid the foundation for where we go tomorrow and in my opinion it is to focus our attentions on the markets. If the markets are abolished commercial sealing will be abolished.
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The other factor for why Sea Shepherd will not intervene is strategic and it is because the Canadian government and the sealing industry want us to intervene.
Why?
Because they need to ignite the passions of the sealers and the fishermen who view seals as a threat to the supply of fish and they desperately need a scapegoat to deflect public attention away from the incompetence of mismanagement by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. They know that if the people in the fishing communities get enraged and angry they would like that hostility to be directed at Sea Shepherd and not at themselves.
We have no intention of playing their game, we have no intention of undoing the results of the European ban. The key to ending the seal slaughter is the markets and Canada has been unsuccessful in overturning the European ban and they have failed in their efforts to create new markets. We also have the advantage of having Gail Shea as the Federal Minister of Fisheries. She has a tendency to stick her foot down her throat. She is to seals what Sarah Palin is to wolves. In other words she’s dumb, vindictive, cruel and predictable. In 2011 she announced a deal to sell seal products to China. Pressure from the anti-sealing movement has stopped that deal. China does not want Canadian seal products.
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