There have been numerous reports of wildlife benefiting from various “lock-down” efforts undertaken to starve the potentially deadly COVID-19 of victims and reduce or even eliminate the carnage it currently creates. We see pictures of deer, bears, foxes, or whomever cavorting on now empty town and city streets from various parts of the world. Marine animals live in an environment suddenly less disruptive to them, and they go about the business of living.
And, that would include what was once the world’s most infamous wildlife abuse issue – Canada’s notorious east coast commercial hunt for young harp seals. It all started some five centuries ago, before Canada existed as a nation, when early European settlers on the rugged east coast shores killed whales, walruses, seals, seabirds, and other marine life, hugely abundant at the time, for various products that could be sold in Europe and other markets.
Prior to European settlement, the local Beothuk first nations people would take a few such animals for food, oil, and clothing. At the time, harp seals often occurred in huge numbers, sprawled over ice, each female with a nursing pup that quickly fattened on rich mother’s milk. But, European settlers saw huge profits to be made and, in time and with improved technologies, the market in wildlife drove numerous species to extinction or to the brink of extinction.
But, greed still found its rewards in the diminishing biomass and the “seal hunt” continued, unabated, pausing only for World War II, when armed enemy U-boats patrolled the region and battles erupted. When the human carnage of war ended, the animal carnage resumed. On March 16, 1964, everything was about to change as the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s French-speaking TV department aired a film of a sealer driving his hakapik into the skull of a baby harp seal.
The resulting outcry was world wide, giving birth to several now huge animal protection organizations as an outraged public was horrified by what various on-site investigations revealed as sealers went about the business of fanning out amid herds of mother harp seals and bashed their photogenic white-furred pups to death. It was no longer oil for the lamps of Europe that was the most lucrative product to be derived from dead pups – indeed, skinned bodies were usually left behind – but the snow white lanugo (foetal) fur of the newborns, shed as they weaned from their mothers’ milk around two weeks of age. The fur was used for trim and trinkets including, ironically, tiny images of baby seals sold as souvenirs.
While all manner of measures and regulations were taken to prevent yet another extinction (and the rarer hooded seal, whose silvery-furred babies were once also commercially hunted, were given full protection), it was what so many saw as sheer brutality that triggered worldwide condemnation to a level unprecedented in Canadian, and perhaps even world, history. Seal hunt proponents argued that their opponents, including glamorous movie stars and newly formed anti-seal hunt organizations richly funded by donations from leather-wearing, meat eating urbanites, were hypocrites who should look to their own multitudinous sins against innocent animals, not all of whom had the emotion-charged visual appeal of a newborn harp seal.
But, not only were many of us on the other side doing exactly that, we failed to see how two or more wrongs equaled a right. As the market for seal hunt products, and the hunt’s profitability, diminished, with corresponding dependence on government subsidy, the objections from animal protectionists and conservationists increasingly included animals in general, with the distinctions between animal protection on one hand, and conservation on the other, starting to blur amid philosophical debates, scholarly discussions, and soul-searching re-examinations of values and traditions.
Fast forward to today. We’re in the midst of a threat against another species – this time it’s us – and quietly and without fanfare or much note, the once infamous Canadian east coast commercial seal hunt has been put on hold, this time in the name of social distancing. Permits will still be issued for local hunting for domestic use. A few people eat the gamy meat of the young seals. Many other commercial fisheries (government wisdom directs seals to be managed as fish) have also been suspended.
The commercial hunt has long been restricted to seals old enough to have been weaned from mothers’ milk and starting to shed the lanugo hair, and so, seal hunt supporters argue, they are no longer “baby” seals. It has always struck me as ironic that we, among the most abundant of the world’s larger species, know enough to say how many is the right number of another species. But, the Canadian government’s position is that there are too many seals; they eat the fish humans want. Science does not support that idea, but science does not always dictate policy.
The infamous collapse of the 1992 Newfoundland cod fishery, when cod biomass fell to one percent of what it once was, is entirely to be blamed on politically based cod quotas consistently exceeding the far more modest recommendations of fishery biologists and conservationists. But, then as now, it is easier to find a scapegoat than challenge profitable business and local tradition, and seals were perfect. Yes, they choose fish opportunistically and have absolutely no preference for and normally do not eat cod, but facts are often the first casualties of political expediency. So, I put the question to retired seal biologist David Lavigne: What will happen when, but for a little incidental take for private use, a generation of harp seals will be left to live? His reply:
“I doubt that there will be any detectable effect of a commercial seal hunt put on hold on efforts to restore cod and other ground fish stocks. There are simply too many variables involved and ecosystem interactions are complex. As counter intuitive as it might seem, for example, in those instances where the seals eat predators of a commercially important fish stock, the lack of a hunt could actually promote the recovery of that stock.” – Biologist David Lavigne
Among those many variables are changing water temperatures, which can impede or enhance survival of any given individuals of fish, or what fish eat, or what eaten fish eat.
But, whatever happens, there is what will probably be a brief and quite partial single generation pause on humanity’s negative effects on at least some species of wildlife. The machinery of destruction, the noise of the emerging Anthropocene, has been just a tad muted. I fear for us all and want to return as much as anyone to everything from hugging friends to library visits to watching sporting events, but meanwhile, for some, not-human beings, there is a bit of a reprieve.
Keep Wildlife in the Wild,
Barry
