The Suffering of These Seals Will Break Your Heart

To ensure that animals are unconscious, sealers should touch the eyeball to check for a corneal reflex – this is now required by Canada’s Marine Mammal Regulations – as quickly as possible after clubbing or shooting a seal. Both reports found that in the majority of cases (79% and 87% of the time), sealers did not check for this reflex.

In 40% of filmed cases studied by one report, injured animals were left on the ice after being clubbed once before hunters returned to hit them a second time. And that doesn't even include the seals that are shot by hunters but escape under the ice, where they die agonizing deaths. Five percent of pups clubbed or shot escape wounded into the sea and are never recovered.

Most seals during the hunt are actually shot from a distance and then dragged from the ice onto boats using steel hooks. More than 120,000 seals were killed last year in just two days.  A process an international veterinary report said, "can never be humane. Any method for killing a seal which does not allow for the above process of stunning, checking and bleeding to be performed has an enormous potential to create suffering and is therefore unacceptable."

Unnecessary suffering of defenseless young animals

Seals are killed with a blow to the head using a wooden club or hakapik or shot.

According to Marine Mammal regulations, "Every person who strikes a seal with a club or hakapik shall strike the seal on the forehead until its skull has been crushed and shall manually check the skull, or administer a blinking reflex test, to confirm that the seal is dead before proceeding to strike another seal. If a firearm is used to fish for a seal, the person who shoots that seal or retrieves it shall administer a blinking reflex test as soon as possible after it is shot to confirm that it is dead."

Yet, sadly, this is hardly the reality. The ice is turned into a makeshift factory, a constant hum from all the engines and machinery filling the air. As the sealers reach the groups of pups, they get off their snowmobiles and run wildly towards them, swinging their hakapiks into the seals’ heads with a dull thud.

They stun as many as they can in this way before going back to kill them. Some seals try to get away, but they are clumsy on the ice, heaving their fat little bodies with an uncoordinated flipper shuffle. Most are only weeks old and don’t yet know how to swim. Many sealers simply give the pup a blow to the head, roll her over and slice a line from the jaw to below the belly. Far too many squirm and clench their flippers as this is happening.

Ignoring cruelty for the sake of profit

Veterinarians, journalists, politicians, IFAW staff and other observers of the Canada commercial seal hunt have seen virtually no enforcement of the Marine Mammal regulations. The few Department of Fisheries and Oceans officers surveying the area seem much more concerned with hunt observers than with the hunters. From the acts of animal cruelty all of us routinely witness, there appears to be very little interest in animal welfare on the part of the sealers or DFO.