The authority also announced new rules to make the slaughter less cruel and to curb international protests over the hunt of seal. According to fisheries officials the quota includes allocations of 2,000 seals for personal use and almost 5,000 seals for aboriginal hunters, as well as 16,000 seals carried over from last year for commercial fleets that did not capture their 2007 quota.
Fisheries spokesman Phil Jenkins informed that Canada has adopted recommendations of the Independent Veterinarians Working Group to ensure beyond any possible doubt that a seal is dead before it’s skinned. He added that the new rules start this year as a condition of holding a seal hunting licence and will appear in marine mammal regulations in 2009. As per the new rules the hunters have to check an animal’s pupils for a blinking reflex, and to slit its main arteries under its flippers, after striking or shooting a seal.
Recently there was huge protest in Europe and North America where demonstrators have denounced the cruelty of seal hunting. Canada banned the killing of the youngest seals, less than 12 days old, in 1987 and that pushed the industry to the brink of collapse. In 2003 Canada approved a three-year cull of some 975,000 seals after estimating their population had ballooned.
Canadian authority said that the seal hunt poses no threat to the harp seal population, and insists the commercial cull is an economic mainstay of its Atlantic Coast communities. The authority has not announced the opening date of the hunt which usually happens in late March or April in the southern Gulf of St. Lawrence.
