Ocean Watch

Friday,  March 26, 2004

In the 1970s Greenpeace sent me a plea for money to help save newborn harp seals from brutal hunting. At the time I didn't know a harp seal from a ham sandwich, but Greenpeace members knew how to open pocketbooks. They sent pictures. I sent money.

My donation went toward an international campaign to boycott Canadian goods and travel there. It also contributed to the circulation of photos of men bludgeoning to death white, wide-eyed seals.

Finally, in 1987, the Canadian government banned the killing of seals less than 12 days old. (Their fur turns gray after 12 days.) Animal lovers throughout the world breathed a sigh of relief, and those horrible slaughters stopped.

Now the images of blood-splattered men holding bloody clubs over submissive seals have returned to our newspapers and magazines. The war has resumed.

The reasons for it, however, have changed. Back in the '70s, fashion drove the seal slaughter. Men bashed in the heads of baby seals so women could wear white fur coats.

Today the pelts are a sideline. At issue now is codfish, a fishing industry along the Canadian east coast that crashed and closed in the early 90s.

The fishers blamed that disaster on the government for not managing the fishery better. Government managers, in turn, blamed the anglers for overfishing and fighting catch limits.

Now, both sides have found a scapegoat. Harp seals, they say, are preventing the cods' recovery because the seals are eating too many fish.

Canada's harp seals are indeed thriving. Over the last 20 years, the population increased from a low of 1.8 million to a current 5 million.

Given that, the Ottawa agency overseeing the seals says they are competing with the Newfoundland fisheries and must be culled.

Killing seals may give unemployed anglers something to do, but it will do little for the cod. One group of researchers found that during a six-year period, the average amount of Atlantic cod eaten by harp seals accounted for only 2 to 4 percent of their diet, depending on the season.

A related Canadian study examined the diet of all four of Canada's seal species. In 1996 these four ate approximately 3.1 million fish. Only 6 percent of those were Atlantic cod. Of the other kinds of fish eaten, only 14 percent were commercial species.

It's we humans, not marine animals, causing fish shortages in Canada and throughout the world. Fishers using super-efficient gear, officials who don't have the courage to do the right thing and an increasing human population are all to blame.

But seals are easier targets. Like our Hawaiian monk seals, harp seals are docile creatures that allow people to walk right up to them. This is especially true of the white-furred pups, which snooze on the ice waiting for their mothers to come back from fishing.

Canada recently announced it will allow 975,000 seals to be killed during the next three years. Sealers pick the ones under 3 months old because their fur, although gray, has few blemishes.

The International Fund for Animal Welfare (www.ifaw.org/ifaw/general) and the Humane Society of the United States (www.hsus.org/ace/8313) are reputable organizations taking donations for this worthy cause. This time, I didn't wait for a mail prod to help the harp seals.