The history of the Atlantic sealing industry from the mid-eighteenth to mid-twentieth centuries is typical of many renewable “resource” histories over this time. Generations of ordinary men went through harrowing hardships on the ice floes to earn a pittance from the sealing shipowners. The ice and sea took the lives of over 1,000 of these swilers—some, like the men of the Newfoundland in 1914, dying in a nightmare of agony. Still, every year, thousands of veterans would return and hundreds of boys would go to the ice to become men. Going to the ice was a way of life, the stuff of song and legend for the sealing townsfolk. With spring hunts in the mid-1800s often taking over a half million pups, swilers worried about storms on the horizon, about ice shifting underfoot, even about fate and spirits—but not about sustainable yields. However cruel to men, the ice protected whitecoat pups, keeping enough predators away, so the sealers reckoned, to ensure an abundance of future breeder seals.
But, as with so many other renewable resources—cod and whales, to name just two—advances in technology along with rising consumption put greater and greater demands on the ability of the harp seal population to renew itself, until it simply could not sustain the increasingly efficient hunts. Owners replaced smaller wooden sailing ships with bigger ones, they replaced sail with steam power, and, finally, they replaced wooden steamers with steel icebreakers, on which they then put refrigeration, radar, and search helicopters. Before long, the “hunt” became a “harvest,” with captains filling holds from an ever-smaller stock of whitecoats.
Global crises—the Great Depression and the World Wars—eased some of the commercial demands on the seal herds. But the statistical trend toward smaller herds of northeast Atlantic harp seals was unmistakable: their numbers fell from as many as 20-30 million in the 1700s, to perhaps 10 million by 1900, and to about 3 million by 1950. And even though the Canadian and Newfoundland governments imposed more and more regulations, the number of harp seals kept falling—dropping below 2 million by the early 1970s.
We’ll never know whether the Canadian and Newfoundland governments could have, by themselves, managed the population of Atlantic harp seals to avoid a collapse. But eastern Canada’s history of the “management” of the northern cod does not inspire confidence in their ability to do so. The matter, in any event, was taken out of their hands when, in the early 1960s, a small group of environmental and animal rights activists launched a campaign that culminated in a European import ban in 1983—and the effective end to the hunt for whitecoats. For the next few years, without buyers or decent prices, hardly any commercial sealers even bothered to go to the Gulf of St. Lawrence or the Front, off Labrador and Newfoundland, and when Canada officially closed the commercial hunt for whitecoats in 1987, many saw it as a sensible decision to repair Canada’s image and avoid any boycott of the more lucrative Canadian seafood industry.
How did this small group of activists manage to pull off such a change in global consumption patterns? Why did this happen for whitecoats and not, say, for cod, pigs, or cows? The answer reveals some of the complexity of how and why ecological shadows of consumption shift, intensify, and recede. With daring stunts and celebrities in tow, a small network of committed activists drew media crews from around the world to the hunt. Pictures of the clubbing and skinning of teary-eyed, pleading whitecoat pups—and the sounds of their wailing mothers in blood-red nurseries—shocked the conscience of millions of consumers in North America and western Europe. Donations to organizations like Green-peace and the International Fund for Animal Welfare began to pour in. More money allowed more elaborate campaigns: with helicopters to the ice, free balloons and T-shirts at rallies, and trips to schools and government offices throughout Europe.
Yet the adorability and accessibility of seal pups only partly explains the power of this campaign to alter the shadow effects of European consumption. Calves and baby pigs are cute, too, and there is plenty of slaughterhouse footage around that’s just as disturbing as any of the seal hunt. But ethical and emotional appeals seem to only go so far in transforming patterns of consumption. Many who are willing to forgo a onetime purchase of a luxury item like a fur coat are far less willing to give up meals of hamburgers and bacon.
Anti-sealing activists from the 1960s to the 1980s confronted far less powerful economic and political forces than today’s animal rights groups do. Sealing was a small part of the Newfoundland economy and a tiny portion of Canada’s. Most sealers and government officials saw the activists more as a nuisance than as a threat to the industry. The result was a response that, in the dry words of the 1986 Report of the Royal Commission on Seals and Sealing in Canada, “can be summarized as ineffective,” with the government underestimating the activists and failing “to respond with an effective counter-offensive.” 1
A decade later, however, having learned from this defeat, the pro-sealing lobby was ready to launch a more effective countercampaign. In the mid-1990s, the Canadian government began to increase the allow-able catch, provide subsidies, and seek out new markets. This was not , officials stressed, a reopening of the large-scale hunt for whitecoats. It was still illegal to kill whitecoats, and only small vessels and local sealers could take mature seals—an essential culling anyway to protect endangered cod from an exploding population of harp seals. Furthermore, new regulations ensured that the hunt would be both humane and sustainable.
As Canada was launching its countercampaign, the anti-sealing activists of old were working on a host of new issues: whales, elephants, deforestation, climate change, to list just a few. The resurgence of the hunt, which in 1996 landed over 240,000 harp seals—75,000 higher than the annual average from 1972 to 1982—took them aback. Regrouping into a broad coalition, the activists argued that the new language of sealing was loaded with deceit. The hunt was not about protecting cod: harp seals ate hardly any commercial cod. It was not about preserving indigenous or local communities, but about the profits from exporting hundreds of thousands of pelts. Nor was it a hunt for mature seals. Beaters were commonly only a few weeks—and sometimes just a few days—older than whitecoats, and were certainly not, in the words of Assistant Deputy Minister David Bevan of Fisheries and Oceans Canada in 2005, “fully mature, independent animals”—harp seals didn’t even reach sexual maturity until 5-6 years of age. 2 And, more important, it was not sustainable. Quotas only counted landed seals; they ignored high shoot-and-sink rates and took no account of deteriorating birthing conditions as a result of climate change.
Today’s campaigns against the seal hunt resemble the past ones— at least on the surface—with activists and celebrities bearing witness at the spring hunts, with footage of sealers bashing pups, with efforts to undercut consumer prices for pelts, and with boycotts of Canadian seafood. But today’s campaigners are confronting a far more effective pro-sealing lobby—one whose counterimages, statistics, and language of sustainability are able to keep markets calm. The coalition of anti-sealing activists is also more fragmented and less effective. Past leaders—Greenpeace and the International Fund for Animal Welfare—now manage corporate budgets and balance numerous crosscutting campaigns. More than 50 smaller anti-sealing groups are now competing for media coverage and donations—and all the groups, large and small, are competing for public attention in a world where more activists are campaigning on more issues in more locales.
The current campaign to end the seal hunt is making some headway in Europe, where, for example, Belgium extended the ban on whitecoat imports to all seal products in 2007. But, with the main markets for processed seal pelts now in countries like Russia and China, bans in Europe no longer pose a threat to the sealing industry. For the first time since the 1960s, sealers took 300,000 harp seals in 2002, then almost 370,000 in 2004, the largest hunt of the last half century. The 2007 allowable catch of 270,000 harp seals was lower than for previous years. But activists could not take credit. It simply reflected the ice conditions that spring, a reason for fluctuating seal catches since the beginning of commercial hunts in the eighteenth century.
The International Fund for Animal Welfare continues to label Canada’s ban on hunting whitecoats a “fragile victory.” 3 Will this moral victory withstand the rationality and efficiency of globalizing markets? Whitecoats, as swilers have known for centuries, are easier to “collect” than beaters or adults, and when not collected have higher natural mortality rates than beaters: gales, thin ice, and shifting floes can plunge tens of thousands into the cold water, where they haven’t enough blubber to survive. Also, absent an outright ban, their pelts tend to fetch the highest prices. Will emerging markets for luxury fur in countries like China and Russia overcome the moral blockade on whitecoats? The honest answer is “maybe,” as activists, corporations, and governments struggle to frame what is environmentally right and ethically wrong for people to consume.