Seal Pelts: An Unnecessary Luxury

"We moved to one pile of dead seals abandoned by the sealers. Steam lifted off the still-warm carcasses toward the sky. No one spoke. A few feet away a whitecoat that hadn't molted lifted his head to the sky and cried out in a series of soft, plaintive wails."

Seal Hunt Witness

When the sealers arrive for the hunt, they pour over the ice in their army of boats, snowmobiles and even a helicopter. The snowmobiles are lowered onto the ice so the sealers can easily reach more groups of pups than they could on foot.

Despite years of research by the Canadian government into developing new seal products, the most economically valuable part of a seal remains its fur, a non-essential luxury product that no one really needs.

Seals are hunted primarily for their fur, and for the oil from their fat, which is refined into Omega 3 products. Seal penises are also sold to Asia for use as aphrodisiacs. Most of the meat is never used.

After the seals are skinned, the carcasses are left on the ice once the pelt and blubber are removed, and thrown into piles like laundry or lined up in formation like a platoon of soldiers. Sealers pile the fresh sealskins onto sleds attached to the skidoos for easy transport back to the boat.

Standard Excuses for Seal Hunt Unconvincing

The Canadian government and those in favor of the commercial seal hunt typically rely on the same rationales to justify the cruelty and waste of killing innocent baby seals. Each of these in turn, however, are neither accurate nor convincing.

The argument that the hunt is essential to the livelihoods of Newfoundland fishermen, for instance, is knocked down by the fact that it brings in little more than 5% of their annual income. Nor is there a particularly convincing case that, absent hunting, seals will ravage Atlantic Canada's remaining cod stock: there is no scientific evidence linking seals to the recovery of cod.