The Ottawa Sun
Sun 26 Mar 2006
By Chris Morris and Kevin Bissett (Canadian Press)

Protesters had to dodge flying seal guts hurled at them by angry hunters as tempers flared on the first day of the East Coast seal slaughter.

Hunting for scarce animals on small, drifting ice pans, sealers were infuriated as reporters and animal-rights activists tried to get as close as permitted to the hunt on the Gulf of St. Lawrence yesterday.

A sealing vessel raced up to a small Zodiac inflatable boat carrying reporters and protesters, and a sealer flung seal intestines in the midst of the observers.

Switched to Rifles

A second sealing boat swerved close to the Zodiac and the sealers cursed at the protesters.

Hunters in the Gulf typically use spiked clubs called hakapiks, but scarce ice conditions are leading many to use rifles because they cannot get close enough to the seals.

Seals and ice were scarce in the Cabot Strait off Cape Breton, observers said. Most of the tiny ice pans and could hold only one seal.

A number of the pans drifting on the calm, quiet waters of the Gulf were empty and stained with blood.

"We should be seeing literally tens of thousands of seal pups out here, and at best, we've seen maybe a couple of hundred," said Rebecca Aldworth, of the Humane Society of the United States, who journeyed out in one of the Zodiacs. "The seals simply aren't out here."

Aldworth said protesters have seen seals being shot and left on the ice to die.

"They're shooting moving seals on moving ice from moving boats at a great distance," she said.

Protesters said the federal government is not factoring high natural mortality due to global warming into calculations for the hunt.

"Canada is being irresponsible by allowing so many seals to be killed," Aldworth said.

Officials with the federal Fisheries Department said they have not witnessed high mortality this year due to poor ice conditions.

Hot, bloody exercise

"The ice was actually fairly good for the critical period of pupping and nursing," said Fisheries spokesman Roger Simon.

"There will always be some mortality and some drowning. There doesn't seem to be any concern this year, because we haven't found dead pups floating and beached."

Temperatures in the Cabot Strait soared into the high teens yesterday, making the slaughter a hot and bloody exercise for hunters.

Sealers in the Gulf can take 91,000 animals this year. A second, much larger hunt off the northern coast of Newfoundland and Labrador will take place in April. Hunters in that slaughter can kill 234,000 seals.

Most of the seals killed are between two weeks and three months old. Pups cannot swim in their early weeks, so if the ice melts, they slip into the water and drown.

This year's hunt has attracted international interest, thanks largely to high-profile pitches to stop the slaughter by celebrities like ex-Beatle Paul McCartney and French actress Brigitte Bardot.

However, the Fisheries Department said it has received only 73 requests for observer permits this year, compared to more than 100 last year, when there were more observers from Belgium and the Netherlands