World has acknowledged the inherit cruelty and brutal slaughter of the seals in the annual commercial spring hunt on the East Coast of Canada but on the other side there are scientific and wildlife management issues. There is no scientific evidence that killing harp seals will benefit commercial fisheries in Atlantic Canada. When the Atlantic cod stocks collapsed in the early 1990s, it was popular to blame the seals for ‘eating all the fish’.
But today scientists — and even most fishermen — agree that seals did not cause the collapse of cod stocks. Quite simply, the cause was over-fishing and failures in fisheries management. Experts said that the most significant predator of small cod was large cod and other large fish (65 percent) — not seals.
It is true that harp seals eat a wide variety of fish, but most of them have no commercial value. Many believe that Canada’s commercial seal hunt is not economically justifiable, and requires government subsidies to exist. This brutal act killed numerous seals which are not biologically sustainable, and the current management approach places the harp seal herd at unacceptable risk of depletion.
