Even Dildo buyer loses interest in Atlantic Canadian sealing products

Post office in Dildo, Newfoundland.

Potential customers for seal hunt nowhere in sight

         ST. JOHN’S, Newfoundland––A token Atlantic Canada seal hunt opened on April 12, 2015, but as of May 4,  2015,  only 28,778 seal pelts had been landed,  according to the Canadian Department of Fisheries & Oceans,  of a quota of 468,000.

         Potential buyers for seal products were nowhere in sight,  despite $5.7 million in federal marketing subsidies and aggressive endorsements of the seal hunt from Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper and many other members of his government.

Namibian seal hunt now the largest

         The collapse of the Atlantic Canada seal hunt leaves the annual fur seal hunt in Namibia, with a three-year quota of 86,000,  as the largest still underway.

Namibian mother fur seal and pup. (All Creatures.org)

         “In 2014 there were only 60,000 seals harvested,”  wrote Paul McLeod of the Ottawa Bureau for the Halifax Chronicle Herald, and that was before the World Trade Organization in June 2014 rejected an appeal by Canada and Norway against the 2009 European Union ban on imports of seal products that sent the annual hunt into an apparently terminal decline.

         “The last seal pelt processor, Carino Processing of South Dildo, Newfoundland, was subsidized by the provincial government to buy pelts,” McLeod continued. “Carino announced in April 2015 that it will not buy seal pelts or fat this year, leaving a $1 million provincial loan on the table. That leaves the industry effectively dead. Anti-sealing groups no longer bother to fly to Newfoundland and Labrador to monitor the seal hunt,” McLeod observed.

Backed out with a foot in the doorway

         Said Carino chief executive Dion Dakins on the CBC Fisheries Broadcast on April 14, 2015, “We just want to focus our efforts on the sale of our existing inventory.”

         But Dakins did not entirely rule out purchasing pelts in the future, should the federal investment open new markets somewhere.

Harp seal. (Humane Society International)

         “Had we continued to just stockpile goods and not appropriately market and plan the flow of goods out the back end, that would be irresponsible. We’re here, we’ve got lots of pelts, we’ve got lots of oil, we’re going to procure the meat we require, and we’ll be here stronger and better next year,” Dakins pledged.

         Carino, a Norwegian-owned company, had long been the only commercial buyer of Canadian seal pelts. The Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans set a 2014 sealing quota of 400,000 pelts, as in 2015, but Carino in 2014 bought only 50,000, at an average price of about $35.

Would-be pol tries to build career by boosting seal hunt

         “Even the president of the Canadian Sealers Association, Eldred Woodford, will not be taking part in this year’s harvest,” lamented 21-year-old New Democratic Party politician Noah Davis-Power in an April 25, 2015 letter to the St. John’s Telegram, of St. John’s, Newfoundland.

Noah Davis-Power, 21, continues Canadian tradition of trying to build political influence in Maritime provinces by promoting the seal hunt. (Facebook photo)

         Davis-Power, who first ran for office under the minority NDP banner at age 18, was almost the last visible defender of the seal hunt during the 2015 sealing season. Of the 181 seats in the Canadian Parliament held by the four Maritime provinces––New Brunswick, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island––the NDP holds ten.

         Davis-Power’s letter, as of May 10, 2015, appeared to be the last notice the Telegram had paid to the 2015 hunt, historically the subject of saturation coverage every spring.

        “With Carino out of the market,”  Davis-Power continued,  “the 30,000 seals will be bought by Bernie Halloran for a new business venture,  PhocaLux International Inc. — quite the turnaround from the near extinction of the Arctic harp seal herd in the 1970s.”

Still hoping to sell seal parts in China

         Explained Terry Roberts of CBC News, “Halloran is the owner/operator of Always in Vogue, a business that specializes in high end outerwear, including sealskin products, with locations in downtown St. John’s and in Moncton, New Brunswick. The company is also involved with a factory in China, where a variety of sealskin products are being manufactured for the sizeable Chinese market.

Bernie Halloran of Always In Vogue appears to represent the last hope of Atlantic Canadian sealers for a comeback.

         “Halloran has formed a partnership with, among others, the Northeast Coast Sealers Co-op, to purchase up to 30,000 seals this spring and process them at a facility in Fleur de Lys, a tiny community on Newfoundland’s Baie Verte Peninsula.”

         Responded Humane Society of the U.S. president Wayne Pacelle, whose organization was the only international animal charity to send observers to the 2015 Atlantic Canada seal hunt, “The company is claiming that it is in the process of developing new markets for seal products in China. Yet, after more than three decades of taxpayer funded, multi-million dollar efforts to promote seal products there, China has never materialized as an important market for the sealing industry.”

Chinese people said “No.”

         Canadian fisheries minister Gail Shea admitted on the eve of the opening of the 2014 Atlantic Canada seal hunt that a 2011 trade agreement to sell Canadian seal meat in China had failed to develop any consumer interest.

ACTAsia for Animals helped to mobilize Chinese opposition to the import of Canadian sealing products. (ACTAsia photo)

         “Shea announced the deal in January 2011 in Beijing,” recalled Michael MacDonald of Canadian Press. “At the time, representatives of the Canadian sealing industry said a cache of seal meat had already been packaged and was ready for shipment to China.”

         But the deal between the Canadian Food Inspection Agency and the Chinese Administration of Quality Supervision was only a protocol for administering seal product imports, not an actual contract for anyone to buy any.

         And the protocol was immediately denounced by a coalition of 42 Chinese animal welfare and wildlife protection societies, headed by Beijing Animal Welfare Association director Qin Xiaona. Thirty of those organizations, active in 14 cities, had already formed a national coalition in opposition to importing seal products.

Seal baculum, or penis bone. (Flicker)

         Said Qin Xiaona, “I am sure Chinese consumers would reject seal products without a moment’s hesitation if they knew the cruelty behind them.”

         Added China Small Animal Protection Association founder Lu Di, “‘Do not give to others what you yourself do not want’ is an ancient Chinese proverb. It is insulting for Canada to market these products in China.”

         Canadian promoters tried earlier to sell seal penis bones in China as having purported aphrodisiacal value.  The attempt failed ignominiously.

Brian Davies posing with white coat harp seal pup.

Swing votes

         The Atlantic Canada seal hunt continues at this point chiefly because Atlantic Canada has historically held the swing votes in a national Parliament divided among multiple regionally strong political parties respectively aligned with Quebec, Ontario, and the three prairie provinces: Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta. Only four prime ministers in the past 60 years have governed with clear majorities.

         Davis-Power, catering to Canadian political tradition, in his letter to the St. John’s Telegram echoed a vitriolic and truncated edition of the locally cherished myth that opposition to the Atlantic Canada seal hunt and the methods used in it only started after then-New Brunswick SPCA inspector Brian Davies started the Save the Seals Fund in 1960, which in 1968 became the International Fund for Animal Welfare.

Early iconic image of Brigitte Bardot posing with seal pup.

         Also part of the myth is that French film star Brigitte Bardot prominently denounced the seal hunt in 1977 only to try to revive her acting career––four years after she had retired from acting to focus on animal welfare work.

         In truth, Bardot had been appalled by Scottish surgeon Harry D. Lillie’s documentation of the 1955 hunt, and first spoke out against it that same year, at the height of her acting fame.

Opposition began before 1900

         William Hornaday, best known as founding director of the New York Zoological Society, mentioned ecological and humane opposition to the Atlantic Canadian seal hunt in Hornaday’s American Natural History (1900).

         Jack London in The Sea Wolf (1904) made the sadistic sealing captain Wolf Larson his most memorable villain. London had witnessed seal-clubbing in Pacific waters; he was also aware of the Atlantic Canadian hunt, and was an active supporter of the humane movement, lending his name to the Jack London Clubs sponsored by the American Humane Education Society.

         The March 1933 edition of The National Humane Review, published by the American Humane Association, recalled that sealing in both Atlantic and northern Pacific waters brought intensive humane protest before 1911, as “No cruelty was too horrible for the seal hunters.”

         The pioneering ichthyologist David Starr Jordan (1851-1931), was an early and outspoken opponent of seal-clubbing, as was Sir George Baden-Powell (1847-1898), who helped instill in his younger brother Robert the love of nature that inspired him to found the Boy Scouts.

         The first wave of protest against sealing subsided after then-U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt in 1911 endorsed into law a set of fur seal conservation measures that 62 years later were combined with whale and dolphin protection legislation to become the Marine Mammal Protection Act.

         But contrary to widespread impression, encouraged by the sealing industry, the 1911 law did nothing to make sealing less inhumane.

Atlantic Canadian sealing survived the 1914 loss of 78 sealers from The Newfoundland, above, and 173 from the Southern Cross, lost with all hands.

251 sealers killed in 1914

         The 1911 U.S. law and the outbreak of World War I appear to have distracted sealing opponents in 1914, when the sealing industry ran into opposition within Atlantic Canada itself.

         The episode began on March 30, 1914 when the Newfoundland left 132 sealers stranded on the ice for 53 hours during a blizzard, due to miscommunication with the Stephano.

         Diverted to the rescue, the Bellaventure returned to St. John’s with the remains of 69 sealers stacked on the deck and 22 surviving sealers whose feet and legs had been so severely frozen that they could not walk. The remains of eight men were not found.

The 1914 loss of the sealing ship Southern Cross with all hands is remembered in Newfoundland much as the Alamo is remembered in Texas.

         The 22-year-old former Norwegian whaling ship Southern Cross, a participant in the seal hunt every year after 1901, was meanwhile last seen by the crew of the Portia near Cape Pine on March 31, 1914. Believed to have been overloaded with seal pelts, the Southern Cross carried a crew of 173.

         After both federal and provincial inquiries, the Newfoundland & Labrador government in 1916 instituted safety rules for sealing ships that quelled public discomfort and enabled the seal hunt to continue. Newfoundland captain Abram Kean continued sealing for another 20 years. His crews cumulatively killed more than a million seals, for which he was awarded the Order of the British Empire in 1934.

Beth & Merritt Clifton

         Humane protest against the seal hunt revived after an exposé of it appeared in the July 1929 edition of The National Geographic. Further exposés subsequently appeared in at least five leading British magazines, and in a 1932 pamphlet entitled The Cruelties of Seal Hunting, by Sydney H. Beard, of London, England.

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