Another Life: This week the biggest seal hunt in half a century began on the icefields off Newfoundland and Labrador. The Canadian government has licensed a cull of 350,000 harp seals, closing its ears to the protests of animal rights and wildlife conservation groups, writes Michael Viney.
Meanwhile last month, the Minister for the Marine, Dermot Ahern, announced EU agreement on a plan to save the lives of thousands of dolphins and porpoises by fitting drift-nets with "pingers" to scare them away.
Seals and dolphins are both marine mammals that eat lot of fish, but only seals have figured hugely in commercial hunting - not, originally, for their skins, but for the oil in their blubber. The wooden schooners of the 18th century took more than 500,000 seals yearly from the ice of the north-west Atlantic, and catches of some 700,000 were reported in the 1800s. Even as late as the 1950s, catches were topping 400,000 - but by now the money was in skins. The Norwegians had found ways of preserving and treating them for the furriers' trade, and suddenly seal-skin coats were all the rage.
Also around that time, Canadian scientists made the first proper study of seal stocks and were alarmed to find how slender was the surplus of pup production. Twenty years on, faced with a real decline, the Canadian government introduced quotas and catches fell to an average 165,000 a year.
Animal welfare groups were already mobilising public opinion with potent TV images of sealers clubbing white-furred pups and splashing their blood across the ice.
Greenpeace took up the cause in 1976, along with the International Fund for Animal Welfare, and in 1983 the EEC responded to petitions, signed by millions of people, with a ban on the importation of white-coat pelts. Soon after, Canada itself announced that the killing of pups was to end. With the collapse of the market, big sealing vessels became uneconomic and landings fell to some 50,000 a year despite annual government quotas of 186,000.
Scientists such as W. Nigel Bonner, the British authority on sea mammals, have emphasised that the anti-sealing campaign was not based on conservation at all. The harp seals represented "a depleted, but not an endangered species" and the views of most people "were based on a gut feeling that it was wrong to bash in the heads of baby seals". Since 1995 the harp seal population has been stable at around 5 million.
For the fishing communities of Newfoundland, the collapse of the seal hunt coincided with that of the stocks of cod that had sustained them for centuries. The two are now firmly linked in the minds of many in the Canadian Maritimes - this despite the research on both sides of the Atlantic showing that seals eat mostly non-commercial kinds of fish. The idea of an "exploding" seal population diverts attention from fishery mismanagement in the past, and helps to justify subsidies for seal-hunting by federal and provincial government wanting to support the local Maritimes economies.
Quotas totalling 975,000 seals over the next three years have brought a new generation out on the ice with clubs and guns.
As old television footage of the killing is re-run, the Irish Seal Sanctuary claims to have been "inundated with outraged calls". In earlier meetings with the Canadian embassy, Brendan Price and his colleagues at the sanctuary felt that in the past "the Canadians at least adhered to sustainability principles and were agreed that seals had been scapegoated for collapsed fisheries. In the resumed culls the Canadians appear to have again abandoned science as well as welfare." Like many other welfare groups, the sanctuary has sought "observer status" at the hunt - at the Canadian government's expense.
A visit to the sanctuary's website, however, (www.irishsealsanctuary.ie) finds a group distinctively free from knee-jerk compassion, well-versed in science-based policies and research and wholly sympathetic to coastal fishing communities. "The ISS," it declares, "has never been in the tradition of seal-hugging conservation and welfare organisations, demonising and marginalising fishermen, emotionally milking the public for funds and power-building for themselves."
More than 20 years on from the notorious clubbing of pups on the Inishkea Islands, it has discouraged such "seal-hugging" activists from involving themselves in Irish maritime affairs. But it has yet to win any funding from the Government, which regards its "welfare" activities - nursing sick seals, and so on - as nothing to do with conservation.
The Canadian cull, renewed at such intensity, seems almost bound to focus new attention on the impact of grey seals on fish stocks around Ireland and Britain. The really big breeding colonies are at huge "seal cities" at islands off Scotland and along undisturbed coasts in Wales. The UK population has been rising at a steady 7 per cent a year and makes some people feel that humans are neglecting their duty as the seal's historic predator.
But marine scientists in both islands are resolute, both on the relative innocence of seal diet and the crude futility of culling.