Alleged seal-killing cover-up in South Dildo

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 1996:

ST. JOHN’S, Newfoundland– –
Fined $750 per count against them on
October 8, assigned up to three years of probation
apiece, and barred from sealing for
three years were Petty Harbor,
Newfoundland residents John Hearn, 39,
shown on a home video clubbing seals with a
boat hook and skinning a seal alive; James
Joseph Walsh, 46, also shown clubbing seals
with a boat hook; and Michael Joseph Hearn,
52, and William Hearn, 41, who each shot
seals with an illegal weapon.
The video recording of their deeds
was delivered to the International Fund for
Animal Welfare by a shocked viewer. But,
said IFAW seal campaign manager Arthur
Cady, “The whole sealing industry is guilty
of cruelty on a vast scale. These four sealers
are just the scapegoats for a barbaric business
that should be in the dock, found guilty, and
banned. The fisheries minister who sanctions
this hunt and the government subsidies that
pay for it should take their share of the
blame.”

Cady waited a month before voicing
his suspicion that the Canadian
Department of Fisheries and Oceans is trying
to lose or bury the findings from a March 30
inspection of the Carino Co. Ltd. seal processing
plant in South Dildo, Newfoundland,
by DFO officer James Francis, whose warrant
application specified that he was searching
for the pelts and fat of blueback hooded
seals and whitecoat harp seals, officially
exempted from the annual Atlantic Canada
seal massacres since 1987. Francis said he
“witnessed whitecoat and blueback pelts
being processed, graded, and stored.”
Since Carino is the only major
buyer of seal carcasses, Francis’ findings are
in effect a potential legal indictment of not
just a politically influentially company but
also of the sealing industry itself.
“One way to get out of this whole
problem,” Cady suggested, “is to drop the
ban, and then you kind of let everything get
swept under the table.”
At least 260,000 seals were killed in
early 1996, in the biggest seal hunt of the
past 15 years, but markets for the remains are
scarce. As a favor to Canada, the British
Department of Trade and Industry moved in
September to drop a regulation requiring that
sealskin products be clearly labeled as such,
and be labeled as to national origin––but
reversed itself on October 9 under pressure
from IFAW, whose clout within the government
was multiplied by the September 1 gift
by the Political Animal Lobby, an IFAW
subsidiary, of one million pounds sterling to
the Labour Party, which is expected to win
the next British election.
However, another seal massacre is
likely this year. Fisheries scientists credit the
increasingly stringent moratoriums on commercial
fishing imposed since 1992 for a 30-
fold increase this year in cod stocks off southern
Newfoundland––but the moratoriums are
unpopular, leaving it politically more expedient
for Canadian politicians to credit last
year’s seal-killing. Momentum for sealing
built this year not only from the March election
of former federal fisheries minister Brian
Tobin as premier of Newfoundland, but also
from the October 5 election of former fox
farmer Keith Milligan, 46, as premier of
Prince Edward Island. The major use of seal
meat over the past two decades has been feeding
ranched foxes and mink.
Blaming fur seals for falling fish
catches off New Zealand, Ngai Tahu tribal
leader Sir Tipene O’Regan in August told a
conference on sustainable fishing, “The
damned things should be culled and the
species managed.” Victoria University
researchers Gina Lento, Geoff Chambers,
and Scott Baker responded that New Zealand
actually has two fur seal sub-species, one of
them rare, while Barry Weeber of the Forest
and Bird Protection Society pointed out that
fishers have already killed at least 9,000 fur
seals over the past five years, who accidentally
drowned in nets. There are currently
55,000 to 80,000 fur seals in New Zealand
waters, down from 1.5 million to two million
when fur hunters discovered them in 1800.
The Irish Fisherman’s Organiz
a t i o n is demanding that Dublin weaken the
1976 Wildlife Act to allow fishers to shoot
seals who interfere with their catch.
Responds Brendan Price of the Irish Seal
Sanctuary, “It suits faceless Eurocrats in
Brussels and Dublin to have coastal communities
clamoring over seals and crumbs, while
systematic depopulation [of fisheries] continues”
due to overfishing.
An Albanian fishing crew– – a t
least some of whom were by their own admission
drunk––on August 21 netted a sea lion,
rarely seen in the Mediterranean; bludgeoned
and tortured the animal for two hours; shot
him to death; then went on television to seek
$3,000 for his frozen remains. After viewers
responded with unexpected outrage, the
state-run Albanian media apparently said no
more about the incident.