Activists in the 1960s made little headway convincing Newfoundlanders to end the annual hunt for harp seals. Although the Canadian federal government did begin to regulate harvesting and impose quotas, activists rejected this response as inadequate. The anti-sealing campaign began to gain ground in the 1970s as environmental groups like Greenpeace joined forces with animal rights groups like the International Fund for Animal Welfare. The activists were idealistic, imaginative, and daring. TV crews captured them confronting hunters with spray paint in a bid to save a few seal pups. Movie stars joined them to cuddle whitecoats in front of millions of viewers.
As years passed, the activists became better organized and began to raise funds for million-dollar budgets. They filled conventions with snow-white balloons and handed out T-shirts with pictures of teary whitecoats to schoolchildren. Petitions with thousands of pages of signatures calling for the hunt to end were delivered to politicians. Over time, the activists also began to focus less on influencing Canadians and more on disrupting the import of Canadian products. This strategy would eventually produce a dramatic victory when activists succeeded in recasting the seal hunt as an immoral slaughter in the minds of European consumers.
Confronting the Seal Hunt in the 1960s
Before 1950, few outside the sealer communities knew anything about the Canadian seal hunt. This began to change by the late 1950s and early 1960s with the first ethical rumblings among animal welfare activists over the “inhumane” methods of the sealers.
In 1955, Harry Lillie, who’d served as a medical officer on a sealing ship six years before, filmed the Newfoundland hunt and sent copies to humane societies; he then published The Path through Penguin City on the brutality of the seal hunt. Many found his firsthand accounts disturbing. Seal pups, he wrote, “were generally killed quickly by a blow on the head, but occasionally I saw men in a hurry just daze them with a kick and cut the little bodies out of the pelts while they lay on their backs still crying.”1
In 1960, the Newfoundland author Harold Horwood, writing in Canadian Audubon magazine, called for a ban on hunting adults, on panning, and on sealing in May, as well as a limit on the number of vessels and size of catches for both Canada and Norway.2 Then, in 1964, came a documentary by Artek Films with footage of a landsman skinning a seal alive. This was the first anti-sealing film to reach a more global audience, playing on Télévision de Radio-Canada in Quebec and later on German television. After seeing the film, Montreal journalist Peter Lust wrote the article “Murder Island,” which was published in over 300 newspapers worldwide.3 Later, the landsman in the Artek Films documentary made a sworn statement saying the filmmaker had paid him to skin the seal alive—and that this had happened before the official opening of the sealing season. In a letter at the beginning of Lust’s 1967 book The Last Seal , the filmmaker denied these allegations and blamed a camera crew from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for staging the skinning of a seal after the end of the season.4 The controversy over the authenticity of the Artek Films documentary didn’t really matter in the end, though: the film was the beginning of a global awakening to the “horror” of the seal hunt.
Canada’s Ministry of Fisheries received thousands of letters from people outraged by what they’d seen; the federal government responded in October 1964 with new sealing regulations. It required all sealers to obtain a license and restricted the seal-hunting season in the Gulf and at the Front to seven weeks. It set a quota of 50,000 seal pups for the Gulf of St. Lawrence, which effectively ended Norwegian sealing there. It made skinning a seal alive illegal and imposed new standards to ensure that clubs were big enough to kill seals quickly. The government also banned overnight panning (except during storms) and the killing of adult seals in breeding patches.
The effect of these restrictions was not dramatic: the average annual harvest of northwestern Atlantic harp seals fell only slightly from 285,000 in 1961-65 to 280,000 in 1966-70. The introduction of quotas, however, shifted the focus of hunters from seals for leather to seals for furs. The value of Canadian seal leather exports was about equal to seal furs in the 1950s. With improving techniques to keep the fur of the pelts firmly attached to the skin, however, seal fur prices began to rise in the early 1960s. Faced with a quota, whenever possible, sealers hunted seals whose fur was in excellent condition—that is, whitecoats, not ragged jackets (molting seals, 2-5 weeks old).5
Many in the growing movement for the humane treatment of animals saw the Canadian government’s response to protests as utterly inadequate. Some, most notably Brian Davies of the New Brunswick Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA), began to call for an end to the seal hunt. Davies first went to the Gulf hunt in 1965. In 1968, he led 18 observers to the Gulf hunt, including a photographer and a reporter from London’s Daily Mirror . The following year, he brought a reporter and photographer from Paris Match . By the late 1960s, these efforts had stirred up intense critical publicity in Great Britain and France. This publicity in turn disrupted markets, and prices for seal pelts tumbled from 1965 to 1968.6
The Canadian government took further measures to make the seal hunt more humane. For the 1967 hunt, it imposed stricter specifications for clubs and banned the gaff (which some sealers would use to hook into live seals). Inspectors were also granted the power to revoke the license of a sealer guilty of inhumane hunting techniques. These new measures upset many sealers. Newfoundland sealers were particularly angry about the ban on the gaff, which many of them saw as vital for their safety—both to hook onto the ice should they fall into the water and to haul men out of the water.7
Measures were also taken to ease the commercial pressures on the sealing population. This was difficult for Canada to achieve alone because the Front, where most of the Norwegians hunted, was in international waters. Some efforts at cooperative management did occur—in 1961, for example, Canada and Norway agreed to end their hunts on the 5th of May—but the continuing decline in the number of seals showed them to be inadequate. The international community became especially alarmed by a 1964 survey that found sealers took 85 percent of the pup population at the Front and 53 percent in the Gulf.
In 1966, Italy became the last member state to sign the Harp Seal and Hooded Seal Protocol of the International Commission for the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries (ICNAF), for the first time establishing international regulation of the seal hunt at the Front. The first measures taken were for the 1968 hunt, whose opening date at the Front was changed from 12 March to 22 March to lessen the pressure on the whitecoats. The closing date for the 1968 hunt was also changed, from 30 April to 25 April, to reduce the number of breeder seals caught. These measures did little, however, to halt the decline in the population of northwestern Atlantic harp seals, which, by 1970, was down to between 1.6 and 1.8 million—a drop of well over a million from 1950 (3.3 million). Although far lower than during the heyday of the seal hunt in the mid-1800s, the 1970 figure was somewhat higher than the 1960 one (perhaps reflecting the difficulty of accurately determining herd size).
Confronting the Seal Hunt in the 1970s
At the urging of the Canadian government, the International Commission lowered the quotas for harp seals at the Front three times in the 1970s: to 245,000 (100,000 each for Canadian and Norwegian vessels and 45,000 for landsmen) in 1971; to 150,000 (60,000 each for Canadian and Norwegian vessels and 30,000 for landsmen) in 1972; and, finally, to 127,000 (52,333 for Canadian vessels, 44,667 for Norwegian vessels and 30,000 for landsmen) in 1976. The Canadian government moved to protect the Gulf herd as well, banning the whitecoat hunt there in 1970 and the use of vessels over 65 feet in 1972: decisions that, in effect, switched the large-vessel hunt entirely to the Front, while reserving the Gulf for landsmen hunters.
These measures did little to appease the campaign against the seal hunt, which had gained momentum in 1969 with Brian Davies’s founding of the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), whose mission was to end the commercial seal hunt in Atlantic Canada. Opposition to the hunt was growing within the United States as well. The Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 forbade the import of products from nursing marine mammals less than eight years of age, effectively banning the import of whitecoats. Although this had little effect on the Atlantic seal hunt (by 1972, U.S. demand for Canadian seals was negligible), it was another sign of the growing backlash to the hunt.
Yet another sign was the increasing ability of protestors to raise funds. The IFAW was raising over a half million Canadian dollars a year by 1973, the year it hired New York advertising firm McCann-Erickson (whose clients at the time included Coca-Cola) to run its “Stop the Seal Hunt” campaign. The firm’s commission of C$100,000 turned out to be a sound investment: the following year, contributions to IFAW exceeded C$800,000.8
Cuddly baby whitecoats became ubiquitous: on posters, in pamphlets, as stuffed animals. The accompanying language of “baby seals” butchered in “nurseries” played on parental instincts to protect human babies. The deaths of these weeping beauties tore at the conscience of consumers; many were horrified by graphic footage of pups seemingly skinned alive.9 Sealers and the governments of both Canada and Newfoundland struggled to counter these images with more businesslike language: “harvest,” “rational management,” and “traditional product.” But the activists were clearly winning the war of words to describe and interpret the “facts” about the hunt. For increasing numbers of consumers, the once brave hunt by selfless providers was now a senseless slaughter of endangered innocents for the whims of the luxury fur market. For millions around the world, swilers were now “killers” and seals now “victims.”10
For 1976, IFAW contributions climbed to over C$1 million. Brian Davies flew a group of American airline stewardesses by helicopter to that year’s hunt—in part to try to debunk the “myth” that the modern-day hunt was dangerous. Greenpeace also traveled to Newfoundland in a storm of publicity after announcing a plan to spray whitecoats with a nontoxic but indelible green dye—and thus destroy much of their commercial value.11
The electronic and print media from around the world—NBC News, Der Stern , the Washington Post , and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation—pounced on the spectacle of a group of young idealists challenging the hardened folk of Newfoundland. Greenpeace focused more than the IFAW on the environmental threats of the hunt. The ever downward trend was irrefutable in Greenpeace’s view: a seal population falling from 20-30 million in the 1700s to 10 million by 1900, 3 million by 1950, 1.5 million by the early 1970s, and 1 million by the mid-1970s.12
Although an angry mob of Newfoundlanders confronted the first wave of Greenpeace activists in the spring of 1976, a compromise was soon reached. Greenpeace agreed not to spray seals with green dye, to leave landsmen alone, and to focus the protest on Norwegian “factory ships.” In exchange, the locals agreed to allow (or at least not to block) Green-peace helicopters from reaching the ice floes. Both sides agreed as well to pressure the Canadian government to declare a 200-mile fishing management zone.
When headlines like “Greenpeacers ‘Converted’ to Sealers’ Side” appeared the next day, many Greenpeace supporters became angry. A Toronto Greenpeace group even mailed a bag of crushed Greenpeace buttons to Greenpeace President Robert Hunter in St. Anthony’s, Newfoundland. But the compromise allowed activists to reach the whelping ice, film the hunt, and later use the footage to stir up a global furor of negative publicity.13
The following year, Canada adopted a 200-mile fishing zone, thus becoming solely responsible for management of the Front. The federal government set a quota of 160,000 harp seals in the Gulf and at the Front and 10,000 for native hunters in the Canadian Arctic. It raised the landsmen’s quota to 63,000, setting the Canadian fleet’s quota at 62,000 and the Norwegian fleet’s at 35,000 (11 vessels went to the 1977 hunt: 6 from Canada and 5 from Norway). To focus the hunt on whitecoats and immatures, it limited the large-vessel catch of adult seals to no more than 5 percent of the total catch.14
Greenpeace and the IFAW returned to the ice floes in March of 1977. The appearance of French actress Brigitte Bardot—and the photo on the cover of Paris Match of her cuddling a whitecoat—sparked worldwide publicity. Recognizing the growing power of this campaign, the Canadian government moved against the activists. It prosecuted Brian Davies for violating sealing regulations by bringing his helicopter too close to the seal hunt; his conviction prevented him from returning to the ice floes in 1978.
To block other protestors from returning to the ice in the spring of 1978, the Canadian government issued an order in council on 26 February 1978, making it illegal for non-sealers to go on the whelping ice without a permit. In a barefaced move, the initial order set the application deadline for the permits as one week before the order was issued. Greenpeace lawyers managed to force the government to waive this impossible deadline. The fight for a handful of permits was nonetheless bitter. Greenpeace members Rex Weyler and Patrick Moore were arrested and charged with “loitering” in a Department of Fisheries office for trying to obtain a permit. In the end, Moore and Weyler did make it to the ice, although Moore was again arrested and charged with violating the Seal Protection Act for interfering with the hunt. His crime: holding a startled whitecoat.15
The actions of the Canadian government, far from stemming the rising tide of global protest, served only to arouse media interest and to provoke consumer anger outside of Canada. The IFAW continued to lobby politicians and worked to gain media coverage in Europe—especially in Great Britain—to influence consumers there. The price of a seal pelt, which had gradually risen to C$20-$30 by the mid-1970s, declined sharply as the protest publicity—and shifting consumer demand, which now favored longer-haired furs—made markets skittish. Meanwhile, the IFAW was steadily growing stronger, raising close to C$1.3 million in 1977.16 Greenpeace also benefited from the campaign to end sealing; some speculated that it was “subsidizing” its antiwhaling campaign with funds it was raising for its anti-sealing campaign.17
Another group—the Fund for Animals based in New York—joined the protest in late 1978 by announcing a campaign to organize a tourist boycott of Canada until it banned the seal hunt. By the beginning of 1979, the group had mailed millions of letters throughout the United States. The Fund for Animals tried to disrupt the 1979 hunt in the Gulf (which the Canadian government reopened to one large vessel in 1978 and two large vessels in 1979) by sailing the Sea Shepherd to the whelping ice and spraying hundreds of whitecoats with red dye. (The crew included Paul Watson, a founding member of Greenpeace and one of the protestors at the 1976 hunt.) Greenpeace went back to Newfoundland in 1979, too, announcing it would now oppose the landsmen hunt. It managed to spray some green dye on a few whitecoats during one brief trip to the ice on 14 March 1979, but could do little more after the Canadian government revoked its permit.
The Atlantic seal hunt in the 1970s took far fewer harp seals than in previous decades, partly because of the protests and resulting market instabilities, partly because of government quotas, and partly because of the comparatively small numbers of whitecoats. The harvest fell about 50,000 from the 1966-70 average to about 230,000 in 1971, then dropped below 170,000 for every year of the 1970s (with lows in 1972 and 1973 of between 125,000 and 130,000) except for 1975, when sealers took about 175,000.18 Environmental protestors characterized the lower harvests as a sign, not of better management, but of a species on the brink of extinction. Animal rights groups were upset that whitecoats still constituted nearly 80 percent of the catch. By the beginning of the 1980s, the backlash to the seal hunt was growing even stronger, especially among European consumers.
Greenpeace continued its campaign of direct action against the seal hunt into the early 1980s. It sailed the Rainbow Warrior to the Front in 1981 and to the Gulf in 1982, where officials arrested members for again spraying green dye on seals. The IFAW, meanwhile, was focusing on mail-in and petition campaigns in Europe, North America, and Australia. It bought full-page ads in European newspapers asking readers to write to members of the European Parliament to encourage an import ban on whitecoats and bluebacks (nursing hooded seals). At least 3 million letters and postcards—and perhaps as many as 5 million—descended on the European Parliament.19
In March 1982, as members of the European Parliament debated a proposal to ban whitecoat and blueback seal imports, the Canadian delegation scrambled to convince parliamentarians of the economic value, sustainability, and humanity of the seal hunt. It did so amid a throng of protestors waving petitions from school children, handing out baby-white balloons with teary eyes, and showing graphic pictures of sealers bashing pups.
The Canadian countereffort—an approach that included handing out buttons saying, “Save Our Cod, Eat a Seal”—was a complete failure. The vote in the European Parliament was decisive: 160 to 10 to ban whitecoat and blueback seal imports into countries of the European Union. Though nonbinding, it boded ill for the Canadian government’s countereffort.
In October 1982, the European Commission agreed with the European Parliament and recommended a temporary ban on the commercial import of harp whitecoats and hooded bluebacks. In something of a stretch, the commission justified its decision by citing the antipornography clause of the GATT, which allows member states to protect public morals. The European Parliament then passed a temporary import ban in November 1982, effective 1 March 1983.20
Meanwhile, the Atlantic seal industry seemed to have recovered slightly in the few years before the European import ban. Harp seal harvests exceeded 165,000 in 1980 and 195,000 in 1981. Because, however, Europe was importing almost three-quarters of all Canadian seal pelts at this time, the ban was devastating. The average price of a seal pelt in 1983 fell by half from the previous year—to just C$13 in 1983. Only three vessels—one from Nova Scotia, one from Quebec, and one from Newfoundland—had even bothered to go to the ice in the spring of 1983, and the total harvest was just 30,000 pelts.
The activists kept up the pressure even on this comparatively small hunt. Paul Watson, now belonging to the newly formed Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, sailed the Sea Shepherd II to just outside St. John’s harbor to block sealers. When, after two weeks, no vessel even attempted to leave the harbor, Watson sailed on to the Gulf, where the Canadian police boarded the Sea Shepherd II and arrested him.
The IFAW, now sensing a full victory, pressed on with the campaign on other fronts. In late 1983, it began to lobby consumers and super-markets in the United Kingdom to boycott Canadian fish products until Canada banned the seal hunt. It distributed over 4 million preprinted postcards urging supermarkets to remove Canadian fish products from their shelves and freezer bins. This yielded quick results. In early 1984, Britain’s biggest supermarket chain, Tesco, announced it would not buy any more Canadian fish products until the hunt ended; the Safeway supermarket chain quickly followed suit. The IFAW then extended its boycott campaign to the United States—which, at this point, accounted for 80 percent of Canada’s fish exports—printing 5 million boycott postcards for American consumers, with targets like McDonald’s and Burger King.
This threat to Canada’s fishing industry ignited calls within Canada to concede defeat and end the seal hunt. Sealers—from Canada’s poor eastern provinces—wielded little influence on federal politics. Moreover, the sealing industry was only a small part of the economy, even for Newfoundland, and, although many Newfoundlanders were angry with the activists, few wanted to risk a boycott of Canadian fish products. In 1982, the landsmen broke ranks with the sealing fleets and formed the Canadian Sealers’ Association, which called for a moratorium on the hunting of whitecoats. This was a safe way to diffuse the global protest without significantly hurting the income of landsmen, most of whom hunted older seals—beaters, bedlamers (immatures from 1 to 4 years of age), and adults.
The Canadian government stood firm, however. As part of its ongoing effort to counter the image of a slaughter of “babies,” the Fisheries Department explained in the Toronto Star of 15 February 1984: “A ragged jacket is like a 20-year old leaving home, and by the time it reaches a year old, it’s been through a couple of jobs and a divorce.”21 Going on the offensive in an article in the New York Times on 10 March, Fisheries Minister Pierre De Bané called the organizers of the boycott of Canadian fish products “blackmailers,” “liars,” and “fascists.”22
Although the large-vessel seal hunt was still technically legal in 1984, no vessels went to the ice. For the first time in centuries, the hunt was left entirely to landsmen. This was the case in 1985 and 1986 as well, after Europe renewed the import ban in 1985. When, in March 1987, two vessels ventured out to hunt beaters and adult seals with rifles, because of heavy ice, they landed fewer than 3,100 pelts.23 This move, however, sparked an angry reaction from activists. The three core groups—Greenpeace, IFAW, and the Sea Shepherd Society—didn’t have time to organize a protest of the 1987 hunt. But it was clear that, if the hunt were to continue, the protestors would be back in force the following spring.
Banning the Hunt for Whitecoats
The population of northwest Atlantic harp seals was now rebounding. By the mid-1980s, there were about 2 million harp seals, with mothers giving birth to about 500,000 whitecoats, and the population was increasing with each season.24 Clearly, harp seals were no longer endangered, much less under threat of extinction.
Nevertheless, at the end of 1987, the Canadian government decided to ban the hunting of whitecoats and bluebacks and the hunting of other seals from large offshore vessels (over 65 feet or 19.8 meters in length). It made these decisions, Newfoundland Member of Parliament John Crosbie would later admit, in large part because of the threat of an IFAW-organized boycott of Canadian fish products, which potentially had a far greater economic impact than the loss of export revenues from a few offshore vessels.25 The government still allowed landsmen to shoot seals from small boats. The 1983 annual quota of 186,000 remained in place, but it was far beyond the landsmen’s capacity to reach and the Canadian harvest of harp seals averaged only 51,000 a year from 1983 to 1995.
For years, activists celebrated the effective end of Canada’s commercial seal industry as a triumph of decency and ecology over needless luxury.26 In a 1989 autobiographical reflection, Brian Davies called it “a victory for Canada”27 —one applauded by the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, the International Fund for Animal Welfare, and Greenpeace, who now shifted their resources to other causes. But, as chapter 21 will show, the battle wasn’t over yet.