The killing fields
Once again, my day started really early. At 6 am I crawl out of bed and attempt to induce a state of consciousness under the shower. In an hour’s time I’ve got to be ready to fly out to the ice fields, but before all this I’m due to be interviewed on Dutch radio. With yesterday’s horrors still fresh in my mind, it’s easy to communicate what I’ve been experiencing. Everyone is shocked by how the knife wielding sealer went after us yesterday. Yet the last 24 hours have been so surreal that I’ve hardly paused to think about how frightening this actually was.
At about 8 am we finally clamber into Guillame’s helicopter. He’s a charming Quebecois who is not afraid to set his ‘copter down on the ice floes. It doesn’t take long until we’re flying over open water and once again admiring the fabulous icescapes. We start looking for some sealing action. Yesterday we were surprised to discover that there were only about 25 boats still out there. Many probably have already left for the Magdalen Islands, heavily laden with the pelts of slaughtered harp seals. A couple of boats sank in the storm and other, mainly smaller boats, gave up once the weather conditions became so treacherous. This all means that it’s difficult to estimate the scale of the hunt. On the first day there were about 70 boats that turned up to kill seals. The ice was simply drenched in blood. In the meantime, the traces of this have been largely washed away by the heavy rain and snow. Given that we huntwatchers were only able to take off yesterday, we are unsure of how much slaughter was actually taking place on the ice at the time. Rebecca Aldworth, our ice guide for today, thinks we are now getting a rather incomplete view of what’s going on since there are relatively few sealers busy clubbing deals and they are spread across a large area due to the fact that they have been stuck in the ice.
Whatever the case I’ve already seen enough sealing misery to get a good idea of how it all goes down here. We land near a sealing boat whose crew are busy ‘harvesting’ baby seals. A Coastguard chopper keeps a close eye on us and, after we land, we are approached by a RCMP agents and a couple of DFO officers who remind us to keep the 10 metre distance rule. They also go over to the sealers to check the length of their hakapiks. All this is going on while someone behind them clubs a three to four week old seal to death and another guy is skinning a couple of other unfortunate animals.
There is a group of four harp seal pups lying peacefully on the ice close by. Admiring their sheer beauty I take a few photos of them. Just a few minutes later one of the sealers walks up to them and mercilessly starts beating their skulls to a pulp. A couple of these animals hopelessly attempt to defend themselves and I hear them uttering cries of fear. It does them no good whatsoever. One by one he smashes their delicate skulls to pieces with his club without even checking to see whether the previous one he clubbed is already dead. Two of these clubbed seals are clearly still alive. One poor animal attempts to raise his head. When the sealer sees thus, he begins to club it again really hard. He them proceeds to skin them.
He’s seriously broken one of the key regulations for killing seals. He should have first checked whether the first seal was already dead by doing a blinking reflex test before going on to strike the next seal. He knows this, but obviously doesn’t give a damn about it. We call back the RCMP and DFO people to make a complaint. Even though the HSUS camera guys have got it all on tape, they refuse to do anything about this transgression. The seal butcher is just left to get on with his work unscathed. The authorities here truly do not give a shit about animal welfare.
Within 10 minutes there is little left of the beautiful seal that I had been admiring. As the sealer leaves, he drags the pelts behind him and we go over to inspect the carcass that remains. Everyone is highly disturbed by the sight of this tiny skinned carcass, which is still moving. It really looks like he is still breathing, but these are just post-mortem muscle spasms and movement of bodily gasses. Steam rises from his body. Once again I find myself silently apologising to this little fellow for what has been done to him. As I write I am haunted by the terrible image of this poor creature and a tear courses down my cheek.
The same thing happened yesterday. I remained completely calm on the ice. I just watched and photographed everything around me without getting emotional. I recognise this mechanism. It is the same one that always clicks into place when I witness animal suffering during my work on the animal ambulance. It’s not that the plight of animals doesn’t affect me – otherwise I’d never have become an animal activist – but there’s little point in getting sentimental about things while they are happening. If I break down and sob my heart out on the ice, I wouldn’t be able to document this mass destruction of animal life effectively. Only when I get back in front of my computer screen does the emotion begin to well up in me. Today thousands of seals have lost their lives simply because a bunch of senseless morons want to wear fur coats. That is certainly something worth crying about.
After having witnessed the slaughter and skinning of many harp seals by this one team, we decide to return to the helicopters to look for some other hunting activity. We quickly land close by and have to leave the chopper with the rotor blades still going. Guillame flys off to land somewhere further away from the sealers. The other team is already on the ice by the time we arrive. The sealers are not at all happy to see us. The coastguard helicopter with police and DFO people on board have already left the area. This means that these seal killers feel safe in approaching us aggressively waving their clubs and hakapiks as they go. It is a very threatening situation. We have to get to our other team quickly to give them strength in numbers. The ice is really unstable and impedes our progress. These men look terrifying, they are drenched in the blood of the seals that they have butchered and are screaming at us to fuck off. We keep retreating and they keep on coming at us. Andrew’s camera is nearly knocked out of his hands and a hakapik one of them is wielding makes contact with his ice stick. Afterwards he realises that his camera is now smeared with seal blood.
Now in a larger group we maintain our stand against these clubbers. They’re only challenging us, but there is always a risk that one of them will lose the plot and really do someone some physical damage with the tools that they are waving around. Rebecca quickly calls the RCMP by satellite phone. They arrive quickly. Naturally they argue that we have brought this all on ourselves and refuse to do anything with out complaint. It’s completely crazy. If one was threatened on the street by a group of people brandishing dangerous weapons, they’d be picked up immediately. However, on the ice the sealers seem to have carte blanche to do what the hell they like and the police can’t be bothered to enforce the laws of the land. We waste a lot of time giving our statements to the police.
We’re left standing on the ice under the blazing sun while we should be gathering more visual evidence of the horrors of the hunt. Of course the police know this damned well. The hunters too. This is why they orchestrate such situations. They’d like nothing better than to ensure that in the future the observers are only able to observe the hunt at a 25 metre distance. These kind of incidents make it easier for the Canadian authorities to argue that such measures are necessary to ensure the safety of hunt observers. Wouldn’t it just be better to take away the sealer’s licences when they threaten observers? This is exactly why the majority of such incidents between the huntwatchers and sealers go unreported to the authorities because this could adversely effect their ability to observe the hunt properly in the future.
Following this incident we have to cross back over the ice to where the helicopters have landed. To be perfectly honest I find walking on thin ice a hell of a lot more frightening that having a bunch of sealers coming at me with hakapiks and clubs! There is nothing quiet so scary as stepping on an unstable chunk of ice. Although one carries a stick to test the thickness of the ice, if it suddenly moves then you suddenly realise just how vulnerable you actually are stuck out on the ice floes in open water!
This was our last trip to the ice. Tomorrow we board a plane to Amsterdam via Montreal. As we fly back over the ice floes to Charlottetown, I can see hundreds of living harp seals moving across the ice. With all my heart I hope that these beautiful creatures will avoid the sealer’s weapons. In the evening I hear that the quota of 90,000 harp seals for the Gulf of St. Lawrence has been reached. The hunt here has now been officially closed. However, this does not mean that the seals left alive are now safe. Soon the ice will melt and they will have developed the right swimming skills to be able to swim towards the Atlantic Ocean where they will join the adult seal herd. On 12th April the commercial seal hunt will reopen on the inhospitable front off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador. Armed with rifles and hooks to haul the animals out of the water, the sealers will go on to make up the rest of the quota of 319,000 harps seals and 10,000 hooded seals. The Canadian authorities are currently deciding the size of the quota for 2006. The way things are now going it looks like the death warrants of more seals than ever will be signed. As far as I’m concerned the only acceptable quota is zero.
At about 8 am we finally clamber into Guillame’s helicopter. He’s a charming Quebecois who is not afraid to set his ‘copter down on the ice floes. It doesn’t take long until we’re flying over open water and once again admiring the fabulous icescapes. We start looking for some sealing action. Yesterday we were surprised to discover that there were only about 25 boats still out there. Many probably have already left for the Magdalen Islands, heavily laden with the pelts of slaughtered harp seals. A couple of boats sank in the storm and other, mainly smaller boats, gave up once the weather conditions became so treacherous. This all means that it’s difficult to estimate the scale of the hunt. On the first day there were about 70 boats that turned up to kill seals. The ice was simply drenched in blood. In the meantime, the traces of this have been largely washed away by the heavy rain and snow. Given that we huntwatchers were only able to take off yesterday, we are unsure of how much slaughter was actually taking place on the ice at the time. Rebecca Aldworth, our ice guide for today, thinks we are now getting a rather incomplete view of what’s going on since there are relatively few sealers busy clubbing deals and they are spread across a large area due to the fact that they have been stuck in the ice.
Whatever the case I’ve already seen enough sealing misery to get a good idea of how it all goes down here. We land near a sealing boat whose crew are busy ‘harvesting’ baby seals. A Coastguard chopper keeps a close eye on us and, after we land, we are approached by a RCMP agents and a couple of DFO officers who remind us to keep the 10 metre distance rule. They also go over to the sealers to check the length of their hakapiks. All this is going on while someone behind them clubs a three to four week old seal to death and another guy is skinning a couple of other unfortunate animals.
There is a group of four harp seal pups lying peacefully on the ice close by. Admiring their sheer beauty I take a few photos of them. Just a few minutes later one of the sealers walks up to them and mercilessly starts beating their skulls to a pulp. A couple of these animals hopelessly attempt to defend themselves and I hear them uttering cries of fear. It does them no good whatsoever. One by one he smashes their delicate skulls to pieces with his club without even checking to see whether the previous one he clubbed is already dead. Two of these clubbed seals are clearly still alive. One poor animal attempts to raise his head. When the sealer sees thus, he begins to club it again really hard. He them proceeds to skin them.
He’s seriously broken one of the key regulations for killing seals. He should have first checked whether the first seal was already dead by doing a blinking reflex test before going on to strike the next seal. He knows this, but obviously doesn’t give a damn about it. We call back the RCMP and DFO people to make a complaint. Even though the HSUS camera guys have got it all on tape, they refuse to do anything about this transgression. The seal butcher is just left to get on with his work unscathed. The authorities here truly do not give a shit about animal welfare.
Within 10 minutes there is little left of the beautiful seal that I had been admiring. As the sealer leaves, he drags the pelts behind him and we go over to inspect the carcass that remains. Everyone is highly disturbed by the sight of this tiny skinned carcass, which is still moving. It really looks like he is still breathing, but these are just post-mortem muscle spasms and movement of bodily gasses. Steam rises from his body. Once again I find myself silently apologising to this little fellow for what has been done to him. As I write I am haunted by the terrible image of this poor creature and a tear courses down my cheek.
The same thing happened yesterday. I remained completely calm on the ice. I just watched and photographed everything around me without getting emotional. I recognise this mechanism. It is the same one that always clicks into place when I witness animal suffering during my work on the animal ambulance. It’s not that the plight of animals doesn’t affect me – otherwise I’d never have become an animal activist – but there’s little point in getting sentimental about things while they are happening. If I break down and sob my heart out on the ice, I wouldn’t be able to document this mass destruction of animal life effectively. Only when I get back in front of my computer screen does the emotion begin to well up in me. Today thousands of seals have lost their lives simply because a bunch of senseless morons want to wear fur coats. That is certainly something worth crying about.
After having witnessed the slaughter and skinning of many harp seals by this one team, we decide to return to the helicopters to look for some other hunting activity. We quickly land close by and have to leave the chopper with the rotor blades still going. Guillame flys off to land somewhere further away from the sealers. The other team is already on the ice by the time we arrive. The sealers are not at all happy to see us. The coastguard helicopter with police and DFO people on board have already left the area. This means that these seal killers feel safe in approaching us aggressively waving their clubs and hakapiks as they go. It is a very threatening situation. We have to get to our other team quickly to give them strength in numbers. The ice is really unstable and impedes our progress. These men look terrifying, they are drenched in the blood of the seals that they have butchered and are screaming at us to fuck off. We keep retreating and they keep on coming at us. Andrew’s camera is nearly knocked out of his hands and a hakapik one of them is wielding makes contact with his ice stick. Afterwards he realises that his camera is now smeared with seal blood.
Now in a larger group we maintain our stand against these clubbers. They’re only challenging us, but there is always a risk that one of them will lose the plot and really do someone some physical damage with the tools that they are waving around. Rebecca quickly calls the RCMP by satellite phone. They arrive quickly. Naturally they argue that we have brought this all on ourselves and refuse to do anything with out complaint. It’s completely crazy. If one was threatened on the street by a group of people brandishing dangerous weapons, they’d be picked up immediately. However, on the ice the sealers seem to have carte blanche to do what the hell they like and the police can’t be bothered to enforce the laws of the land. We waste a lot of time giving our statements to the police.
We’re left standing on the ice under the blazing sun while we should be gathering more visual evidence of the horrors of the hunt. Of course the police know this damned well. The hunters too. This is why they orchestrate such situations. They’d like nothing better than to ensure that in the future the observers are only able to observe the hunt at a 25 metre distance. These kind of incidents make it easier for the Canadian authorities to argue that such measures are necessary to ensure the safety of hunt observers. Wouldn’t it just be better to take away the sealer’s licences when they threaten observers? This is exactly why the majority of such incidents between the huntwatchers and sealers go unreported to the authorities because this could adversely effect their ability to observe the hunt properly in the future.
Following this incident we have to cross back over the ice to where the helicopters have landed. To be perfectly honest I find walking on thin ice a hell of a lot more frightening that having a bunch of sealers coming at me with hakapiks and clubs! There is nothing quiet so scary as stepping on an unstable chunk of ice. Although one carries a stick to test the thickness of the ice, if it suddenly moves then you suddenly realise just how vulnerable you actually are stuck out on the ice floes in open water!
This was our last trip to the ice. Tomorrow we board a plane to Amsterdam via Montreal. As we fly back over the ice floes to Charlottetown, I can see hundreds of living harp seals moving across the ice. With all my heart I hope that these beautiful creatures will avoid the sealer’s weapons. In the evening I hear that the quota of 90,000 harp seals for the Gulf of St. Lawrence has been reached. The hunt here has now been officially closed. However, this does not mean that the seals left alive are now safe. Soon the ice will melt and they will have developed the right swimming skills to be able to swim towards the Atlantic Ocean where they will join the adult seal herd. On 12th April the commercial seal hunt will reopen on the inhospitable front off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador. Armed with rifles and hooks to haul the animals out of the water, the sealers will go on to make up the rest of the quota of 319,000 harps seals and 10,000 hooded seals. The Canadian authorities are currently deciding the size of the quota for 2006. The way things are now going it looks like the death warrants of more seals than ever will be signed. As far as I’m concerned the only acceptable quota is zero.
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