Is the sealing industry subsidised?

The Norwegian government subsidises its sealers "to ensure sound regulation of seal stocks and to maintain traditional hunting skills so that seal populations can continue to be appropriately regulated." However, the government is also engaged in efforts to develop markets for seal products, with the aim of making the industry independent.

Greenland's Home Rule government introduced subsidies for professional sealers after the European whitecoat ban collapsed the market in 1983. In 2006, it paid out 22.5 million kroner to help fund the hunters' equipment.

The Canadian government also began subsidising its sealers after the market collapsed in 1983, but only for market and product development, including a meat subsidy (1995-99) to encourage full use of the seal. With the return to profitability of the industry, all subsidies ceased in 2001.

How important is sealing to Canada's economy?

At the national level, the economic contribution of sealing is small, yet it represents a significant source of income for over 6,000 individuals and their families in remote coastal communities in the Province of Newfoundland and Labrador, at a time of year when employment opportunities are extremely limited. In some communities over 25% of households take part in the hunt, and among those people the hunt can account for 25-35% of their annual income. In 2006, the hunt ranked fifth in landed value among all seafoods, worth approximately $30 million. This contributed approximately $55 million to the provincial economy.

Exports of pelts in 2006 were valued at $16,395,000, while exports of meat and oil were valued at $1,588,000. Click here for more details.

Are harp seals really hindering the recovery of Newfoundland's cod stocks?

While overfishing by humans was undoubtedly a factor in the collapse of Northwest Atlantic cod stocks, a wide range of factors may be responsible for their slow recovery thus far. Whatever the cause or causes, the Canadian government is adamant that commercial sealing quotas are set solely based on how best to conserve seal stocks, and are not influenced by any attempt to help groundfish stocks recover.

As for how many fish seals actually consume, there is also a lot of uncertainty, except for one thing: they consume a lot!

Consider these statistics. One harp seal eats about 6 lbs of fish per day. According to a 2004 survey, the Northwest Atlantic harp seal population now stands at about 5.8 million, nearly three times what it was in the 1970s.

So those seals eat an average of 34,800,000 lbs - or 15,785 tonnes - of fish every day! Or 5,761,589 tonnes per year.

This compares with Canada’s annual wild fish harvest quota of just 1 million tonnes per year.

Do sealers sometimes skin seals without killing them first?

According to the animal rights mythology, skinning an animal while it's alive saves time or bullets or both. Common sense, on the other hand, should tell us that skinning an animal that is dead is infinitely preferable to skinning one that struggles and bites. And since a skinning knife is at hand anyway, in the unlikely event that an animal is still alive, the animal can still be killed with ease.

In reality, the inspiration for the IFAW-created myth was probably observation of a "swimming reflex". The following explanation is from Animal welfare and the harp seal hunt in Atlantic Canada; PDF or HTML; by Pierre-Yves Daoust et. al, Can Vet J Vol. 43, September 2002:

"When killed by acute trauma to the brain, seals, like other animals, often undergo a period of tremors or convulsions. These consist of strong lateral movements of the caudal portion of the body ... which have been interpreted by some animal welfare advocates as implying persistence of conscious life."

"The frequent occurrence of strong swimming actions in seals killed by trauma complicates the determination of their death from a distance, for example by videotape. These reflex movements may last considerably longer in seals than in terrestrial animals because of the unique adaptation of their musculature to diving, including a much larger store of oxygen associated with the higher concentration of myoglobin. Moreover, the pattern of this reflex activity can be erratic and does not necessarily decrease gradually in intensity from the time of death. For example, sheep and cattle stunned by nonpenetrative percussion collapsed with signs of tremors, followed by slow hind leg movements that increased in frequency and could develop into vigorous hind leg kicking. Complete immobility immediately following a blow to the head should actually alert the sealer to the possibility that the animal is still conscious, especially if this immobility is accompanied by contraction of the body. This fear-induced 'paralysis' is a typical behavior of harp seals and hooded seals; other authors have commented on the possibility that such immobile seals might be interpreted as dead by inexperienced sealers and, therefore, might still be conscious when skinning begins."

What is a seal "pup" and are they commercially harvested?

English-language terms used for seals are more commonly associated with other animals: "bulls" for adult males, "cows" for adult females, and "pups" for the very young. There are also a variety of terms used for juveniles.

"Pup" is an abbreviation of "puppy" dog, derived from the Middle French word poupée, meaning a doll or puppet.

According to general usage, words such as "pup", "calf", "kid", "foal" or "kit" are not age-specific. Rather, they describe young which are still dependent on their mothers for survival. However, since many larger mammals have periods of dependency that extend well beyond weaning from the mother's milk, a misconception has arisen that a "pup" or its equivalent must be several months old or more.

In the case of seals, however, dependency ends with weaning, and weaning does not take long. Hooded seals are weaned on average after just 8 days, and sometimes as short as 4 days, the shortest period of any mammal, during which they double in size from about 24 kg to 47 kg.

But hooded seals are still not commercially harvested until they lose their "blueback" coats at 14 months old. The most relevant example in determining whether "pups" are commercially harvested is the harp seal.

Harp seal pups are weaned at about 12 days, and about two days later start to lose their white coats.

"Whitecoat" harp seal pups were an important component of commercial sealing. Within the Canadian hunt the killing of whitecoats was generally phased out following a 1983 ban by the European Union on their products and in 1987 was banned in Canada.