by Sarah Cleaves

Created on: July 30, 2008   Last Updated: September 02, 2009

Every year the blood of baby seals as young as 12 days old stains the ice as Canada's commercial seal hunt begins, managed by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO). The brutality that follows can only be described as barbaric.

Though laws are in place to insure the manner in which the seals are killed is humane, every year many seals are killed outside the specified guidelines. As the hunting takes place in an unpredictable environment where the sealers have to contend with slippery ice, shooting form boats and seals in the water, many of the seals are struck and lost.' Having received a fatal blow or shot the seal either escapes by slipping into the sea where it will later die from its injuries or is left on the ice to suffer in pain. As the amount of ice decreases the amount of sealers shooting from boats increases and so does the number of struck and lost' seals.

Though the DFO specifies that once struck or shot the seals must be checked for a blinking reflex to make sure they are dead, many sealers have been observed to strike the seals at random and neglect to check for the reflex before dragging still alive bodies across the ice and proceeding to skin them while they are still conscious. As a highly competitive business many of the sealers are far more concerned with getting the job done quickly and killing as many seals as possible than with maintaining a humane hunt.

The Canadian government claims that the hunt is closely monitored, but in such conditions this is barely possible. It is clear that the humanity of the hunt is not a priority when few of those reported for inhumane killings by charities who watch the hunt closely are punished. The atrocities are allowed to continue. Many believe that given the extreme and difficult conditions in which the hunt takes place a humane hunt is not even a possibility.

If the cruelty involved isn't enough of a reason for the Canadian government to put an end to the hunt, then surely the threat it poses to the seal population is. Every year the government is presented with the number of seals that can be killed without damaging the population, and yet every year the government disregards the advised figures and places the total allowable catch (TAC) limit for the year at a higher level. What's more, when the TAC is inevitably exceeded, there are no penalties enforced.

The severity of the effect the hunt has on the seal population can not be fully understood until you realise the number of deaths that are not

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