‘Vicious’ Seal-Hunt Advocates Fight Back Trying Marketing Campaign To Counter Their Bad Image

Weary of being branded vicious thugs, Canada’s seal hunters are fighting back with a slick marketing campaign touting such products as seal pepperoni and cure-almost anything seal-oil pills.

It’s a new tactic for the sealers, who face a high-decibel trans-Atlantic protest campaign as the seal-hunting season moves into full swing over the next few weeks.

The anti-sealing lobby is recruiting celebrities to help oppose what it calls “the largest slaughter of marine mammals in the world.” Rallies are planned in London and Ottawa this month to protest the federal government’s willingness to raise the seal quota to its highest level in years.

“The seal hunt will be shut down - make no mistake about it,” said animal-rights activist Paul Watson, the co-founder of Greenpeace. “If we have to drag the Canadian flag through the mud to do it, we’ll do so.”

But in Newfoundland, base of the sealing industry, there is equally strong determination to keep the hunt going - even to expand it by finding markets for virtually every part of a seal carcass.

Public-relations kits being prepared by the sealing industry contains no images of seals, but plenty of glossy photos of appetizing dishes prepared with seal meat.

Samples of seal sausage and seal pepperoni are being offered at food fairs across Canada. Newfoundland’s first seal-leather tannery recently opened. And Canadian and Asian health stores are stocking seal-oil pills which allegedly ease arthritis pain, unclog arteries and relieve symptoms of diabetes.

Seal penises are sold in Asia for use in aphrodisiacs - something more quietly noted by the sealing industry.

“We’ve been carrying on the seal hunt in Newfoundland for 200 years,” the provincial fisheries minister, John Efford, said in an interview. “There’s no group in the world that’s ever again going to stop it.”

The hunt almost was stopped in the 1980s. Protests resulted in a European ban on the import of seal pelts, driving large commercial sealing ships out of the business.

Newfoundlanders continued smallboat hunting, but the market was so poor by the early 1990s that only about 50,000 seals were taken annually.

Starting in 1996, the annual kill rose to more than 200,000. Government officials decided to back the industry with temporary subsidies in hopes of partly offsetting the loss of 27,000 jobs when Newfoundland’s vital codfish industry collapsed in 1992.

This year’s quota is 285,000, and Efford said it could increase if markets for seal products are strong.

Efford says animal-rights activists are more concerned about seals than Canadians struggling to survive in a province with 18 percent unemployment. “Why are these so-called humanitarians not concerned about 400 communities in Newfoundland left without work?” he asks.

Anti-sealing activists have tried to counter the economic argument by suggesting that sealers shift to eco-tourism, serving as guides for tourists wanting to view the seals close-up on their ice floes.

But mostly, the anti-sealing campaign depicts the sealers as vicious.

The industry’s most vocal antagonist, the London-based International Fund for Animal Welfare, alleges that many seals are skinned alive and abandoned on the ice after their penises are removed for export to Asia. It contends that white-coated baby seals continue to be killed, even though the practice was banned a decade ago.

Last year, the group sent federal fisheries officials a videotape that it claimed showed sealers committing 140 violations of hunt regulations.

The government charged seven sealers with 17 offenses, including failure to kill a seal quickly and using improper instruments.

Tina Fagan, a former radio host who heads the Canadian Sealers Association, says the issue of cruelty is pivotal. Her group has enlisted a national veterinarian watchdog panel to help ensure that the 6,000 licensed sealers use the most humane methods possible.

Efford, however, admits that the hunt is inherently bloody.

“Who would suggest that killing is pretty?” he asked. “You can go into any slaughterhouse in the world - who’d want to take pictures?”

One argument the anti-sealing lobby cannot use is that the seals are endangered. The last government count, in 1994, estimated there were 4.8 million harp seals in the region. Efford says today there are about 6 million, posing a threat to already dwindling fish stocks.

The IFAW says there is no proof that seals are responsible for the codfish shortage. The group also disputes claims that the seal industry is worth nearly $20 million a year, saying its net value is minimal if costs of enforcement and government subsidies are deducted.