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January/February 2000 issue	In this issue Table of Contents Editor’s Notebook Inside Story Feature: Seal wars Curious by nature

In the January/February 2000 issue of Canadian Geographic, Newfoundland writer Ray Guy investigates the debate surrounding the Atlantic seal hunt. He looks at how hunters, animal rights protesters, politicians and the press converge and clash each spring on the Atlantic sea ice.

Here, Canadian Geographic Online offers you a deeper look at seals and the sealing industry.

WE LEAVE ST. JOHN’S AIRPORT at eight in the morning on March 18, 1999, in a small plane bound for St. Anthony, 500 kilometres away on the northern tip of Newfoundland. Provincial fisheries minister John Efford has collected several dozen journalists. We are going to be shown why millions of seals must be slaughtered to save what is left of the cod fishery and Newfoundland. The minister is far ahead of even the radio open-line programs in his zeal on the matter.

Below passes Bonavista Bay, Notre Dame Bay, White Bay. The sea is white with ice to the horizon, the land white with snow. Only long black fingers of bare rock sticking through show where land ends and water begins.

There are occasional clusters of tiny houses among the black rocks, with a frail thread of road leading away from them. A cameraman in the seat ahead claims he’s spotted some seals on the ice "like black pepper sprinkled on a tablecloth." I think if anything, or anyone, persists in a place like this, it is passing sinful to trouble them further.

In most of Atlantic Canada before the early 1970s, no one would have bet a plugged nickel on the future of the centuries-old practice of clubbing wild animals to death. A few hundred fishermen from Prince Edward Island, Îles de la Madeleine, Que., or the northernmost bays of Newfoundland still killed seals on the ice of March to augment their annual incomes by a few percentage points. But their several weeks of gory work each spring was scarcely noted, or else these sealers were disparaged as seal butchers for the Norwegians. Then, as now, the furrier Rieber and Company of Bergen, Norway, bought nearly all the pelts of seals killed in Canada, took them overseas in a raw state and transformed them into fashion statements. Sealing was scorned, especially in Newfoundland, as the bottom of the employment barrel, the embarrassing dregs of a desperate past best forgotten.

Joseph Smallwood, premier of the new province for 23 years following Confederation in 1949, held as his core mandate, from first to last, the task of "dragging Newfoundlanders kicking and screaming into the 20th century." Smallwood believed industrialization through megaprojects was the way forward and so downplayed even the cod fishery, let alone sealing, as a thing of the dismal past. So great was Smallwood’s hold on the electorate, and so little was his political opposition, that by the start of the 1960s, Newfoundland parents were warning their offspring to eschew the fishery as the devil would holy water.

In the communal consciousness, sealing was relegated to folk song and story of a bleak and tragic cast. Newfoundlander Cassie Brown wrote her masterpiece, Death on the Ice, about a sealing disaster in which sealers’ frozen corpses were stacked on a St. John’s pier like winter firewood. E. J. Pratt’s poetry was taught in the schools. His doleful lines on sealing tragedy — "ring out the toll for a hundred dead, who tried to lower the price of bread" — were to be memorized. In local legend, at least, the Pope had once declared the seal to be a fish, so that during Lent and on meatless Fridays, starving Roman Catholics had a little better chance to preserve both body and soul. The only virtue salvaged from a couple of centuries of seal killing was stoicism in the face of misery and calamity.

AIRPLANES DO FOR MY HEAD what the English claim horseback riding does for the liver: shakes it up nicely. I sit with my forehead against the vibrating triple-plastic window enjoying the view of low-flying seraphim.

We fly over Fleur de Lys, where the fish plant burned down in the mid-1990s. When the cod moratorium was imposed, many insured fish plants went up in smoke. The province’s fire chief said that if fish plants kept burning down at that current spanking rate he would investigate with a sharp eye indeed.

At St. Anthony airport, we are joined by Gary Lunn, Member of Parliament from Saanich-Gulf Islands in British Columbia and the Reform Party’s then-shadow fisheries minister. He had been visiting several coastal communities offering sympathy for their socio-economic distress and trying to sign up converts to his party. "You’ve got one hell of a fine lifestyle and culture here on this little island," he says, "and those damned seals shouldn’t be allowed to mess it up."

After three or four hours of waiting around, my group of five seal viewers, including Lunn, Efford’s public-relations person, Mary McNab, and her assistant, steps aboard the helicopter and takes off. From half the kitchen windows in Newfoundland you can see seals on the ice every March, but nothing like this. There are, of course, no sealers in view, just some of the "six million ravenous, marauding, cod-destroying seals," as Efford puts it. Still, the ice is bloody. It is the birth blood and the afterbirth of this whelping patch of harp and hooded seals. Our helicopter is so low that when some 350-kilogram "dog" hoods inflate the bladder of skin on their heads and gape angrily up at us, I can see their white teeth.

I ask McNab if there are any requests from tourists to come and see the spectacle. "None. Absolutely none," she says quickly. Seal tourism is taboo here, it having been suggested by Greenpeace and others.

Suddenly, Lunn shouts at the pilot through our communal headsets: "Get down. Get right down on top of ’em let’s see those bastards really scuttle." The helicopter suddenly lurches sideways and drops. Everything goes white. Lunn looks white, too, and says little further.

We head back to the St. Anthony airport to wait some more and catch a plane to St. John’s, where Efford greets us at the airport for a press conference. Wearying of what seem to be many toadying questions, I ask: "Minister, has Viagra cut into the market for seal penises?" Efford lasers me with a frightful glare, pivots 180 degrees on his heel toward another camera and later implies that I am a traitor to Newfoundland.

BY THE 1970S, sealing in Atlantic Canada had taken a sudden turn. What followed has been called many things: the March madness, the 30-year war, the duelling helicopters, the annual ice follies, and the new Crusades. One form of cynical zealotry seemed to spawn another and so began the three-decade devil’s dance over an industry whose value to Canada’s gross national product has been equated to two Macdonald’s hamburger outlets. What once seemed to be a perishing relic instead split into three: the original European sealing industry with headquarters in Bergen; the pro-sealing industry subsidized by the Canadian taxpayer; and the anti-sealing industry dominated by the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW).

Two events may have sparked this turn: in the 1960s, a languishing Welsh immigrant living in Fredericton viewed a Quebec documentary film containing seal-killing scenes and was shocked into founding, in 1969, what was to become IFAW; and, in 1972, a former fish-plant owner replaced Smallwood as Newfoundland premier and surveyed the social and economic chaos resulting from Smallwood’s great industrial dreams.

Brian Davies came to Canada in 1955 and, as an indigent college dropout, joined the Canadian military and achieved the rank of lance-corporal. He settled in Fredericton and did student teaching and volunteer work for the local Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. One summer evening in 1967, Davies saw a film on CBC television that showed scenic and old-fashioned activities from remote corners of Quebec - outdoor bread ovens, horse and wagon haymaking, and some brief scenes of seal hunting on Îles de la Madeleine in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. Reports of these "picturesque" scenes of three-week-old whitecoat seals being clubbed to death in a slurry of blood and ice prompted a public outcry in Canada, the United States and Europe. Davies took a trip to the ice to see for himself and found his new mission in life.

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