Seal of approval

It’s been a yearly tradition for Eldred Woodford since he was a teenager. Each spring, usually around the first week of April, he heads onto the ice off the coast of Newfoundland with a crew of seven or eight to hunt seals.

“You get up at daylight and you’re at it until the wee hours of the next morning .... it’s a pretty gruelling activity when you’re at it.” 

Sealing crews often bring in about 250 animals per day of hunting.

The last few seasons haven’t been easy for Canada’s sealers. From the closure of European markets, to the impact of the global recession and international campaigns trying to stop the controversial hunt, as Woodford puts it, “the industry has bottomed out.”

But now, members of the industry say Canada’s seal sales are once again looking up.

Making it in major markets

The Canadian government is working with seal producers to make their products available to more international markets.

The European Union closed its borders to Canadian seal products in 2009, and the federal government is now appealing that decision at the World Trade Organization. The international body is not expected to make a decision on the case until at least early next year. 

Meanwhile, Canadian seal products are now available in one of the world’s biggest consumer markets. Earlier this year, Canada and China signed an agreement allowing the export of edible Canadian seal products – such as smoked and cured meats, terrine and omega-3-rich oil supplements – to that country.

A Canadian sealer kills an animal in the annual hunt.

According to the Canadian government, China is “the biggest consumer of fish and seafood in the world.” A Fisheries and Oceans Canada website is cautiously optimistic, saying “it is difficult to predict how much or how quickly the Chinese market for these products will grow.”

But David Barry, seals and sealing network co-ordinator with the Fur Institute of Canada, said the China deal marks an important change in the way other countries consider Canada’s controversial hunt.

“Symbolically, it’s a huge step for the industry. Because what China has said is that they’ll look at seals as though they’re any other animal product, which is something the Europeans didn’t do. They looked at it and they made a categorical judgment. They said, ‘that’s immoral.’ But China looked at it differently ... they’ve said, okay, we’re not going to discriminate against you just because it’s a seal and because there’s a lot of bad press.”

Diversification a solution

Members of the industry say it’s not only the demand for seal products that’s shifting; seal producers are now supplying international consumers with a growing range of products.

Dion Dakins owns NuTan Furs Inc., a seal processing plant in Trinity Bay, Nfld.“It’s a natural product, it’s one that comes from nature. So we think there’s a certain marketability if we can tear down the negative stigmas.”

He’s confident that “the industry is reshaping itself to become more modern and more applicable to a broader base of both accessible markets, but also product lines.”

And so, at his plant, workers do more than just prepare pelts.

“One of the big misconceptions is that we only use the fur. One hundred per cent of the oils are also processed,” he emphasized.

“There’s also been a great deal of investment ... on the biomedical side, where they’re investigating heart valves for placement into humans. There’s also the development of the meat industry. Seal meat is one of the few meat sources that has a high omega-3 content.”

At its peak, Dakins says NuTan Furs Inc. was processing about 140,000 seals per year. When the industry was at its lowest immediately following the financial crisis, that fell to about 25,000. Last year, they processed about 65,000 seals. 

Dakins is confident that recovering trend will continue.

“It’s a natural product, it’s one that comes from nature. So we think there’s a certain marketability if we can tear down the negative stigmas,” he said. “We see a shift in how seal products will be seen in the very near future.”

Controversy continues

Not everyone, however, is quite so certain Canada’s seal industry is recovering.

Emily Lavender, who organizes anti-sealing demonstrations for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), calls the opening of new markets and development of new product lines “a desperate attempt by the Canadian government to prop up [a] dying industry.”

PETA claims Canadian seals are being cruelly killed.

“The court of public opinion has spoken and wants it stopped. At the end of the day, this is a consumer issue,” she said. “Nobody wants to wear seal fur any more. It’s got a worse public stigma than a cold sore.”

Lavender argues that the violent nature of the hunt is inhumane and she disagrees that the demand for seal products is growing.

“The issue here is cruelty to animals. These sealers hook these animals in the jaw or eye sockets and drag them across the ice, often while they’re fully conscious. Some of these seals are skinned alive. They’re thrashing about in pain until a sealer finally comes up and clubs them to death,” she said.

“People all around the world have seen these videos. People all around the world know that this is inherently cruel,” she said. “Nobody wants the product because of where it’s come from.”

 Still sealing

 Woodford has heard all those arguments before and this isn’t the first time he’s seen the market fluctuate.

“Anybody who’s been sealing very long knows it’s an up-and-down industry. It’s never an industry that just keeps going and going and going,” he said. “I’m not 40 years old yet, and I’ve seen the ups and downs in this industry two or three times already in my lifetime.”

So, later this spring, he’ll be back on the ice with his crew and hoping for a good hunt.

Front page photo courtesy of International Fund for Animal Welfare.