NEXT week, weather permitting, hundreds of men armed with clubs will scramble onto the ice floes covering the sea off eastern Canada and kill more than 300,000 baby harp seals. It will be the largest seal kill since 1970.
The Canadian government maintains that the catch is sustainable, reducing numbers by only 5 per cent. But a detailed analysis by Greenpeace highlights uncertainties in the government鈥檚 population estimates, and Greenpeace says the government will be unable to assess the impact of the hunt for 10 years or more.
Paul Johnston at the Greenpeace Research Laboratories at the University of Exeter, UK, says that the government department Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) used a population estimate of 5.5 million harp seals to calculate its catch quota. The last official seal count, in 1999, put numbers between 4 and 6.4 million, and Johnston says the margin for error would be greater if all uncertainties were included.
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Since nearly all the seals caught are newborns, the hunt鈥檚 full impact will not be seen until the survivors reach reproductive age, five years from now. And as surveys are conducted every five years, it could take 10 or even 15 years for any damaging effects of the hunt to show up, Greenpeace argues. What is more, the seals are threatened by global warming melting sea ice. 鈥淭he only scientifically justifiable course of action must be to suspend the commercial seal hunt immediately,鈥� concludes the Greenpeace report.
The DFO is unlikely to back down. Increasing demand for seal fur in east Asia has led to a boom that earned Canada CAN$16 million (more than US$13 million) last year. Greenpeace is not just rejecting the good science underpinning the quotas, says Canadian fisheries minister Geoff Regan, it is 鈥渏eopardising the livelihoods of hundreds of coastal communities which rely on the seal hunt鈥�.
These communities are reliant on the hunt since the catastrophic collapse of the region鈥檚 cod stocks, which until 1992 provided a major source of employment. Critics of the seal hunt point out that the fishing quotas that preceded this collapse were set by the same DFO office in St John鈥檚, Newfoundland, that set the seal-hunt quota.
鈥淭he only scientifically justifiable course of action must be to suspend the commercial seal hunt immediately鈥�
Canadian officials claimed until last year that the seals were hampering the fishery鈥檚 recovery by preying on cod. Now Regan admits that the science behind this claim is shaky, and says the hunt is 鈥渘ot an attempt to assist in recovery of fish stocks鈥�.
Meanwhile, cod populations show no signs of recovery, says Jeff Hutchings of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Predation by seals could well be a factor. 鈥淏ut you could never kill enough seals to make a difference to the recovery of the cod,鈥� he says. Fisheries scientists fear that the cod crash may be permanent. Greenpeace fears harp seals may suffer the same fate.
