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$60 A SEAL?
SEAL ECONOMICS 101: CANADA
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by Kate Baggott
may6-may12 2004 |
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Europe noticed Canada again. It can only mean one thing: seal season. The one time a year that Europeans think of us, it’s as a nation that clubs baby harp seals.
Just how did Canada become the international bad guy of sealing? Even if Canada has the biggest hunt, it isn’t the only one. Greenland, Norway, Denmark and Russia, among other countries, hunt seals and use similar equipment.
The annual story of Canadian brutality and greed is a tough journalistic habit to break. This year, though, the articles below the headlines reflect shifting attitudes of animal rights groups and public opinion. In Europe the basic brutality of the hunt has become less appalling and if greed is still a factor, it isn’t Canadian greed.
The modern seal hunt is no less brutal, says the International Fund for Animal Welfare. The organisation monitors the hunt and escorts government and media representatives onto the ice. Their website quotes Rebecca Aldworth, the organisation’s seal team leader: “This year we saw terrible cruelty, and almost no government monitoring of the hunt. Just metres away from us, conscious seal pups were sliced open. They were dragged across the ice with boat hooks. Injured seals were left to die in stockpiles of carcasses.”
While many articles quote the IFAW, and still more describe their hunt videos, there are fewer independent confirmations of the details. Without them, dramatic news has become a fact–filled debate: an IFAW witness describes pups being skinned alive. A government marine biologist explains that, because of the higher amount of oxygen marine mammals retain in their blood, the nerves twitch for a long time after death. The IFAW maintains it has never seen hunters perform the blinking eye reflex test to confirm a seal is dead before skinning it.
Pressure from animal rights groups other than IFAW has abated. Since 1987 the white baby seals have been protected until after they are weaned and begin to shed their white coats. The biological infancy of seals ends at about the 12th day of life when the mothers leave their pups. While IFAW says 95 per cent of the seals hunted are less than three months old, it is not white pelts but the spotted and silvery grey furs that are now traded in the marketplace. In response to this protective legislation, Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund withdrew their direct participation in the protests.
With less participation from these organisations, Europe is delving into the issues that have arisen since the EC banned baby seal pelts in 1982. In the years of the fiercest anti–sealing protests, European consumers rejected all seal products. The market for seal pelts collapsed and the economic fallout was immediate.
Canada’s northern peoples suffered. The Inuit trade in pelts dropped from 50,000 in 1977 to fewer than 1,000 in 1987. The only source of income in some communities, the collapse of the seal trade led to unemployment not only among hunters, but craftspeople and others working in spin off industries.
The situation complicated the moral issue for Europeans. No one wanted to cause further injury to a people whose traditions had been destroyed and who were already suffering from generations of racism. Concessions were made to Inuit hunters as a matter of conscience.
Sealers from Norway and Greenland then started meeting with animal rights groups. Bringing their tools and traditional craftspeople with them, European hunters claimed that their way of life had been misrepresented. The meetings coincided with a period of growing identification among European nationals with the wider European community and culture. Norwegian traditions were European traditions. Concessions were made again.
Canada’s hunters have never been organized enough to tell their story in Europe. No one knows that Newfoundland’s hunters share some traditions with their native counterparts. Few Europeans know that Newfoundlanders eat seal meat and even fewer know that eating seal is often an economic necessity.
The only organization to represent sealers’ interests to media and industry, the Canadian Sealers Association, was closed in March after its government funding was cut. Sealers themselves hadn’t been supporting the association. Membership fees and a 25 cent premium on each pelt went unpaid.
Even though Canadian seal hunters don’t have an official representative, no one in Europe believes that hunters are getting rich on the seal cull, even if their financial prospects are looking up.
According to the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs, the estimated value of all seal products was $48 million in 2002. That figure includes the sale or trade of handicrafts, pelts, oil, meat and adult penises, used for aphrodisiacs. Critics of the hunt claim the government has double and triple counted goods in its calculations to justify the kill. They also add that seal meat is sold, gifted and traded through so many informal channels that its value can’t be calculated.
Independent sources put the direct value of sealing to Newfoundland’s economy at between $15 and $20 million, which includes a government subsidy of $1.7 million.
The money that actually goes into the hunter’s pockets is harder to pin down. Depending on the ideological view of the estimators, a pelt is worth between $34 and $75. In 1994, following the collapse of the market, the Government of the North West Territories guaranteed hunters $30 per seal–pelt as an incentive to hunt. Since 2001–2002, sales of fur products in Europe have been increasing by 20 per cent to 35 per cent per year. As a result, pelt prices are up. The British Fur Trade Association told the UK Independent that its members paid up to $60 per seal pelt last season and expect a similar price in 2004.
If the seal hunters kill the upper limit of seals this year, the maximum value of their pelts is $21 million. Of the 12,000 licensed seal hunters in Atlantic Canada, only 5,000 participate in the hunt. If each of the active hunters shares equally in the maximum kill of 350,000 seals, they will each take home $4,200 at the end of the 6 week season — minus expenses. There may be additional income from the sale of meat and adult male seal parts sold for use in traditional Chinese medicines, but since the majority of hunted seals are under three months old, this would be only a small addition.
Most seal pelts don’t stay in Canada. That hasn’t changed since the beginning of the fur trade four centuries ago. London is still the global centre for pelt sales. The European Union is still the largest producer and consumer of seal pelts, but a new class of capitalist elite in Russia, China and other emerging economies has also increased demand.
Of the 300 major European designers showing fur collections, up to 75 are thought to use seal in some way, but identifying the species used in runway collections is growing harder and harder to determine due to modern fabric handling techniques. New dye and processing techniques used prominently by fashion houses like Christian Dior, Yves Saint Laurent and Helmut Lang make one trend clear — the modern fur doesn’t look like fur. Instead it looks and feels like velvet, feathers, vinyl or even fake fur.
Not that demand for fur coats has disappeared. According to the UK Independent, a full–length coat lined with seal fur sells for more than $4,000 in Russia and more than $7,200 in Denmark. Other furrier markets said to be using seal are based in Saudi Arabia, Japan, Singapore and other parts of the Middle East or Asia — markets that are never affected by the anti–fur lobby.
The seal hunt is a lesson in colonial economics. It is a remnant of when most Canadians did tough physical work to send the country’s resources abroad. Following these traditional ways, seal hunters still put themselves in serious danger out on the ice floes for a small income while Europeans make the real money.
(All amounts converted to Canadian dollar value according to markets at press time.)
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