Viagra vs. sealing–it might help the sealers, too

From ANIMAL PEOPLE, June 2001:

ST. JOHN’S, New-foundland–Seal pelt prices tripled and a two-week extension of the Atlantic Canada seal hunt, originally to have ended on May 15, encouraged sealers to kill two to three times as many infant harp seals in 2001 as in 2000. Just 91,000 seals were landed in 2000. By early May 2001, the toll stood at 186,000.

But even selling pelts for $40 in Canadian money, up from $13, will not leave sealers with more than a marginal profit. A June 15 report by Canadian Institute for Business and the Environment president Gary Gallon, commissioned by the International Fund for Animal Welfare, found that federal and provincial governments have spent $20.5 million [Canadian funds] since 1995 to prop up sealing via 38 different subsidy programs.

The annual investment of about $3 million brings a return of only $6 million per year to sealers and seal product processors, Gallon wrote. Even with a moratorium still in effect on commercial cod fishing in Atlantic Canadian waters, Gallon said, sealing accounts for only 1.1% of total fisheries income from Newfoundland and Labrador, and 0.03% of the Newfoundland Gross Domestic Product, creating the equivalent of just 50 fulltime jobs.

Further, the advent of Viagra suggests that the market for seal parts is not about to pick up. Acknowledged a February 2000 Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans report on declining demand for seal products, “The increased use of Viagra, as a substitute for seal penises, may be a factor,” along with falling demand for seal meat and cuts in the Canadian government sealing subsidies.

“In Viagra,” conservation biologist Frank von Hippel predicted in a 1998 article for Science, “we now have the potential to eliminate the demand for animal potency products. Provided that the distribution and availability of Viagra are ensured, the East Asian market in aphrodisiacal foods could soon fall.”

In an unpublished follow-up study, von Hippel recently told Christian Science Monitor staff writer Ilene R. Prusher, “We found that rhinos, bears, and tigers will not benefit, but many other species will, including seals.” The species which will not benefit are hunted as trophies and for body parts believed to have non-aphrodisiacal medicinal value.

The prices paid for rhino horn, bear galls, and tiger bones would not be hurt by a collapse of aphrodisiac demand. Seal penises, on the other hand, were recently the seal parts with the strongest market. “I’ve had sealers call to complain, ‘I got me freezer full–and not a Chinese wants to buy,'” Canadian Sealers Associ-ation director Tina Fagan told Colin Nickerson of the Boston Globe.

Russia

Competition from the former Soviet Union is also involved. The current Russian sealing quota is 76,000; another 15,000 seal pups are captured alive and killed later on fur farms. IFAW-Russia representative Masha Vorontsova “was hopeful last year that the hunt would be ended by legislation that was passed by both houses of the Russian Duma,” reported Patrick Cockburn of the London Independent on May 10, “but the bill was vetoed at the last minute by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin,” who has also abolished or weakened Russian environmental protection standards.

Vladimir Potelyov, sea mammal lab chief at the Polar Institute of Fish and Oceanography in Archangel, warned in early May that about two thirds of the estimated 350,000 harp seals born this year in the Barents Sea might starve, after unusual northeast winds drove the ice into the deeper White Sea, where the capelin and crustaceans that newly weaned seal pups depend on would be beyond their ability to dive. This last occurred in 1966.

“Environmental groups spent the next week scrambling to set up a rescue,” Alice Lagnado of the London Times reported from Archangel on May 12. “Greenpeace offered to send an icebreaker. The Archangel Rescue Service was inundated with calls from local people wanting to donate cash to help the seals. The Murmansk Shipping agency prepared to send a rescue ship,” staffed by 43 sailors who volunteered for the mission.

But “Hardly any pups were seen by biologists who flew over the White Sea,” Lagnado continued. “Critics suspect the Polar Institute of exaggerating the numbers to justify a large seal cull.  Potelyov is believed to have strong ties to the government’s pro-culling lobby. Potelyov and his fellow scientists are paid to take part in the cull each year, and it is in their interest to promote seal hunting.” Potelyov, Lagnado added, said that the flyers failed to see the seal pups because they were swimming underwater.

Seals really were in trouble at Lake Baikal, Siberia –and still are. The population of nerpa seals in the landlocked lake has fallen from more than 100,000 in 1994 to about 67,000 now, a Greenpeace Australia team warned on May 22 after a month-long visit to Baikal. Hunters legally kill 5,000 nerpas per year, and poach as many more, the Greenpeace team found, concluding that, “All the conditions are in place to lead to the extinction of the nerpa.”

Sweden

“Animals are sentient beings with an intrinsic worth,” Swedish agriculture minister Margareta Winberg told a May 29-30 European Union conference on means of implementing animal welfare standards throughout the EU. Winberg recommended, as an apparent policy statement of the Swedish government, that the EU should establish “an animal ombudsman or an animal welfare authority” to protect animals’ rights and promote animal welfare.

Less than a month later, however, the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency broke a ban on seal hunting in Swedish waters in effect since 1988, authorizing fishers who are complaining of declining catches to kill 180 gray seals in the Baltic Sea this fall, plus 180 more next year.
The major motive for the Canadian seal hunt also tends to be placating fishers. After encouraging overfishing during the 1980s, the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans halted commercial cod fishing in July 1992. Seals made a convenient scapegoat. Nine years later, they still do. A DFO report issued on April 9, 2001 found that the Atlantic Canada cod population “remains at an extremely low level and there is no evidence of a recovery.” The report estimated that of total cod biomass of 77,000 metric tons, harp seals annually consume 37,000 metric tons: nearly half. The impact of “food-and-recreation” cod fishing, still permitted, was passed over lightly.

Five veterinarians including former Canadian Veterinary Medicine Association chair Alan Longair meanwhile confirmed in an April 8 joint report, based on examinations of 76 seal carcasses, that sealers hook, drag, and skin alive up to 42% of the seal pups they kill. “It is quite clear from our personal observations,” the veterinarians agreed, “that the present seal hunt fails to comply with basic animal welfare regulations in every aspect.”

The veterinarians’ visits to the ice were funded by IFAW, whose own personnel documented more than 260 instances of illegally hooking, bleeding, or skinning live seals, leaving wounded seals to suffer, and clubbing seals with illegal implements, said IFAW-Canada director Rick Smith. IFAW has submitted documentation of such offenses to the Department of Fisheries and Oceans each year since 1998, but only 17 sealers have actually been charged.