Sealing Industry in Death Throes

The sealing industry is a dying market. Sealing is considered by many to be barbaric, and unnecessary.
Last year, 1.6 million dollars were made off of sealing. This is a 32.4 million dollar drop from the 2006 season. This is due to the decline of hunters participating.

“It is unlikely a seal will be stunned effectively with a single blow or shot. Instead, animals are left wounded and terrified, lingering on the ice in pain, suffering and distress. Some seals are struck and lost,” The International Fund for Animal Welfare said.

It is encouraged that sealers “humanely” kill the seals and seal pups. However, evidence has shown that sealers rarely ensure a quick and painless death to the seals. Many seals are struck with clubs over the head or in between the eyes. This does nothing but disorient the seal. Often pups are also impaled or struck in the eyes.

“Many animals are left to suffer in agony, crawling through their own blood on the ice,” The executive director of the Humane Society International-Canada, Rebecca Aldworth, said.

The sealing industry is declining rapidly. Canada however continues sealing every year.

“I think sealing is wrong, especially because it isn’t necessary,” junior Melissa Dieda said.

“Hunters take their boats into dangerous waters or rush across moving ice pans in attempts to kill as many baby seals as possible in the short time available. Seal pups, most too young to escape, are either shot or hit with a spiked wooden club called a hakapik,” The International Fund For Animal Welfare said.

The pressure that hunters are under with the inconvenient conditions of the climate almost ensures inhumane killing.

Monitoring these boats is also an impossibility. The hunting-boat-to-monitoring-boat ratio makes it impossible to regulate the humane killing of these seals. Humane killing is rarely practiced or achieved.