WiLD Blog

The ice floes where harp seal pups are born have broken up and many animals have drowned.

Each year, the Canadian government allows the massive slaughter of hundreds of thousands of harp seals. Last year, approximately 325,000 harp seals were killed, about 6% of the total population. This massive killing only brings a revenue of $14.5 million dollars. That is, Canada only gets $40 per seal. Furthermore, after costs and indirect subsidies are taken into account (patrolling the hunt, upgrading plants, promoting the hunt, developing new markets for seal products and supporting research to find new products), Canadians would likely find that the hunt actually costs the Canadian taxpayer money. The hunt has become a cull, designed more to achieve short-term political objectives than those of a biologically sustainable hunt.

Last year, The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) released a study by conservation biologist Professor Stephen Harris of Bristol University, which shows that the quota levels in the seal hunts of Canada and Greenland “pose a threat to the very survival of the harp seal population.” When the seals that are struck and lost, that is wounded animals who escape and are not recovered, more than half of all the seal pups born each year are slaughtered, Harris said. “When such hunting pressure last occurred, the harp seal population declined rapidly by over 50 percent,” said Harris. “Given seals only reach breeding age at about five to six years old, it could be too late to intervene by the time the impacts of current hunting levels are understood.” The Harris report criticizes the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) for failing to include environmental variables such as climate change in their Atlantic Seal Management Plan.

In 2007, the threat of climate change to harp seals is not a possibility anymore. The first stage of Canada’s controversial annual harp seal hunt is likely to be scrapped because the ice floes where pups are born have broken up and many animals have drowned. Canada’s federal fisheries ministry, which oversees the hunt, said the pups had been born as usual this year but the ice floes had then been blown far out to sea and started to break up before the seals learned how to swim properly.

The first part of the hunt, which had been due to start on March 28, occurs in the Gulf of St Lawrence to the south of the Magdalen Islands on Canada’s East Coast. Hunters move across the ice floes, shooting and clubbing to death young seals.

“This is the first time I’ve ever seen this in 25 years … for sure there is increased mortality,” fisheries spokesman Roger Simon said from the Magdalen Islands. There is ice (south of the islands) but there are no seals on that ice,” he added, saying the animals were now well out of the range of most of the hunters’ vessels.

In Cabot Strait, there is wide open water and almost no seals,” Internationl Fund for Animal Welfare researcher Sheryl Fink said. “I only saw a handful of adult harp seals and even fewer pups, where normally we should be seeing thousands and thousands of seals.”

The ignominious policy of the Canadian government and climate change may be a lethal combination, the road to the extinction of harp seals. The irony of harp seal hunting is that the Canadian government and isolated fishing communities insist they need the supplemental income from the hunt, since cod stocks have dwindled due to overfishing. I wonder what will be the supplemental income when harp seals dissapear due to overhunting and climate change.

What can you do? Boycott Canadian seafood

Seal hunting is an off-season activity conducted by fishers from Canada’s East Coast. They earn a small fraction of their incomes from sealing—primarily from the sale of seal pelts to European fashion markets. But the vast majority of the sealers’ incomes are from commercial fisheries. Canadian seafood exports to the United States contribute $3 billion annually to the Canadian economy—dwarfing the few million dollars provided by the seal hunt. The connection between the commercial fishing industry and the seal hunt in Canada gives consumers all over the world the power to end this cruel and brutal slaughter. Don’t consume Canadian seafood or eat in restaurants that buy Canadian seafood. You have the power to stop the harp seal slaughter.

Saul

This week the New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert continues her groundbreaking analysis of global climate change with a look at how human related carbon emissions are turning the ocean acidic in “The Darkening Sea: What Carbon emissions are doing to the ocean.” Kolbert’s original work in The New Yorker is spelled out in her book, Field Notes from a Catastrophe. The article is an excellent summary of the reams of scientific research that has been published widely. Kolbert’s article should be required reading for anyone who believes that San Diego’s coast will be or has been immune from the impacts of climate change and that a small population of harbor seals represents a significant threat to our coastline.

Some of Kolbert’s observations include the following:

• “The concentration of carbon dioxide in the aid today—three hundred and eight parts per million—is higher than it has been at any point inn the past six hundred and fifty thousand years, and probably much longer.

• “At the current rate of emissions growth, carbon dioxide concentration will top five hundred parts per million—roughly double pre-industrial levels—by the middle of this century.”

• Increases in carbon dioxide levels “will produce an eventual global temperature rise of between three and half and seven degrees Fahrenheit, and that this in turn, will prompt a string of disasters, including fiercer hurricanes…and the inundation of many of the world’s major coastal cities.”

• “Already, humans have pumped enough carbon into the oceans—some hundred and twenty billion tons—to produce a .1 decline in surface pH…a .1 drop represents a rise in acidity of about thirty percent.”

• “Because of the slow pace of deep-ocean circulation and the long life of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, it is impossible to reverse the acidification that has taken place.”

Kolbert, as did Ken Weiss did in his brilliant Alerted Oceans series in the Los Angeles Times, argues that this drop in pH levels will give way to an increase in ocean slime and jellyfish that will occupy ecological niches now filled by, well, fish and the rest of the ocean food chain.

The irony here, is that while Jerry Sanders, Scott Peters and the Stepford Wife public servants at the City’s Recreation Department squander public monies on dredging projects for Children’s Pool, continue to defend the bizarre rope barrier at La Jolla Shores, and oversee San Diego’s wasteful kelp eradication program, Mother Ocean will soon be taking its revenge on San Diego. The years of defending the dumping millions of gallons of sewage into the ocean, failure to clean up Mission Bay, criminal contempt for warnings about the antiquated sewage treatment system, spending millions on sand replenishment projects, and ignoring the corruption of the Bajagua project’s blocking efforts to reduce border pollution, are now coming home to roost.

If a small population of harbor seals freaks out the anti-seal brigade in La Jolla, imagine the response to beaches filled with slime and jelly fish. It is rumored that Jerry Sanders, like President Bush believes that global climate change is a hoax. Sorry, Jerry. Let’s see you finally, for once, take some leadership on the issue that will matter most to the future of San Diego.

Thanks to San Diego Councilperson Donna Frye and our friends at the Sierra Club especially Ellen Shively and John Hartley for continuing to lead the effort to have the City of San Diego protect harbor seals at Children’s Pool. Given the overall threats to marine mammals due to increasing changes in ocean chemistry (becoming more acidic), it is more important than ever to protect these seals. The behavior by anti-seal activists who devote their energy to harassing the seals is unprecedented. Serge

S.D. panel OKs more time for seals

Proposal extends closure of beach
By Bruce Lieberman
SAN DIEGO  UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

November 16, 2006

The harbor seals at Children’s Pool beach in La Jolla could receive an early Christmas present this year – an extra month of private beach access.

A proposal approved by a city committee yesterday would extend the period Children’s Pool is roped off to people from Dec. 15 through May 15. The beach is now closed from Jan. 1 through May 1.

The extra time will help protect pregnant seals and their unborn pups, and young seals still dependent on their mothers, city officials said. The pupping season for harbor seals typically runs Jan. 1 through May 1. Mother seals have sometimes abandoned their pups on a beach after they’ve been disturbed or harassed.

The San Diego City Council must approve the proposal, and the California Coastal Commission will likely review the plan.

Activists who want the beach preserved for the seals supported the proposal, but they said it will mean little if the city doesn’t enforce it. They have long complained that neither city lifeguards or federal officials enforce barriers at the small beach.

“As long as there is no enforcement of your own municipal code, this travesty will continue,” said Ellen Shively, conservation chair of the San Diego chapter of the Sierra Club and one of 12 speakers in support of the measure. “Let the seals have their distance.”

A city ordinance unrelated to the barrier states, “it is unlawful to kill, wound, disturb, or maltreat any bird or animal, whether wild or domesticated” unless permitted by the city.

A rope barrier was erected along the western section of the cove in 1999, but in September 2004, it was taken down when the City Council decided to give people and seals equal access.

In 2005, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal agency that enforces the federal Marine Marine Mammal Protection Act, recommended to the city that it replace the rope barrier. City signs urging people not to harass the seals were not effective, and the seals needed to be further protected during pupping season, the agency said.

On April 19, the City Council voted to re-erect the barrier from Jan. 1 through May 1.

“Children’s Pool offers a unique experience,” said San Diego resident John Hartley. “Nowhere else can people get so close to harbor seals and . . . experience nature. It’s a treasure that we should protect.”