Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Distinguished members of the standing committee, thank you for the invitation to appear before you today.
My name is David Lavigne and I am science advisor to the International Fund for Animal Welfare. I have been conducting research on harp seals and other pinnipeds since 1969.
IFAW is an animal welfare organization whose mission is to improve the welfare of wild and domestic animals throughout the world by reducing the commercial exploitation of animals, by protecting wildlife habitats, and by assisting animals in distress.
Let me begin by stating the obvious. The controversy surrounding Canada’s commercial seal hunt, like all debates in modern conservation, is not about science or about facts. Rather, it is a conflict over differing attitudes, values, and societal objectives and differing views about what is right and wrong. In other words, Canada’s sealing debate is a political debate with ethical overtones.
Within this political debate, scientific facts often become misrepresented, misquoted, or fabricated by some of the participants. Today I would like to spend a few minutes discussing what is known and what is unknown about some of the issues surrounding Canada’s seal hunt. I will also provide a few insights from modern conservation biology to suggest a way forward.
Canada’s seal hunt is the largest remaining commercial hunt of a marine mammal population anywhere in the world. That alone makes it an important conservation issue, despite what you may have read or heard. Modern conservation is about managing the impacts of human activities on individual animals, populations, and ecosystems, and it is about values
According to the latest published estimate, the northwest Atlantic harp seal population numbered about 5.8 million animals in 2005. That estimate has confidence limits of plus or minus 2 million animals, meaning that the population could have been as low as 3.8 million, or as high as 7.8 million. Such scientific uncertainty must be taken into account when developing management plans for any exploited species.
Canadian government scientists also tell us that the current sustainable yield is about 250,000, but of course that estimate is also uncertain. If the population were actually lower than 5.8 million animals, then the estimated sustainable yield would be lower as well.
As you are well aware, the current total allowable catch, or TAC, for harp seals is 335,000 animals, and that exceeds the estimated sustainable yield. The current TAC should therefore cause the population to decline. In this sense, the current TAC is not sustainable.
For the fourth time in the past five years, Canada’s landed catch in 2006—over 353,000 harp seals—exceeded the TAC, this time by almost 20,000 animals. Such overruns would not be tolerated in a well-managed hunt, yet this hunt is frequently described as well managed.
Unless the TAC is reduced and enforced, the government’s model predicts that the harp seal population will continue to decline. Over 95% of the animals killed in Canada’s commercial seal hunt are recently weaned pups, aged two weeks to about three months, animals that the majority of Canadians consider to be “baby seals”.
Public opinion polls repeatedly tell us that the majority of Canadians are opposed to the killing of seal pups.
While the fullest possible use remains an objective of the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans, that objective is not coming close to being realized. Most of the carcasses are left on the ice or dumped in the water. A recent report from Memorial University in Newfoundland claims that 80% of the blubber is discarded. The situation has become even worse in Norway, Canada’s major sealing partner, where the government subsidizes the killing of harp seals and now, apparently, pays out further subsidies to burn the pelts.
In short, hunts for harp seals in Canada and elsewhere are extremely wasteful, violating a 100-year-old founding principle of conservation, and raising serious ethical issues in the process.
Speaking of ethical issues and seal blubber, I note that one witness before this committee admitted that he has disguised shipments of seal oil to the United States. Such practice by Canada's sealing industry is not only unethical, but it is also illegal under U.S. law.
Moving on to broader fisheries issues, we know that harp seals did not cause the collapse of cod stocks off Canada's east coast. Furthermore, there is no scientific evidence that harp seals are impeding the recovery of cod or any other fish stock. In fact, culling harp seals might actually be detrimental to the recovery of cod. There is therefore no scientific justification for culling harp seals.
As DFO scientists, among others, have noted, legitimate proposals to cull seals should be submitted to independent evaluation, such as that outlined in the United Nations Environment Programme's protocol for the scientific evaluation of proposals to cull marine mammals. Canada has yet to do this. Regardless, there is emerging evidence that harp seals play an important and positive role in the northwest Atlantic ecosystem. Such marine ecosystems are extremely complex, and we have neither the expertise nor the ability to manage wild populations or entire ecosystems. All we can really do is try to manage human activities.
Then there's animal welfare, another component of modern conservation. Since 2000, two groups of veterinarians have examined Canada's commercial seal hunt. Although you would never know it from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, both of these veterinary reports are qualitatively remarkably similar. Both document what most reasonable people would consider unacceptably high levels of animal suffering. Consistently, when a third group of veterinarians was brought together by the World Wildlife Fund in 2005, that panel listed 11 recommendations that would have to be implemented in order to make Canada's commercial seal hunt more humane.
The only viable conclusion from the available evidence is that Canada's commercial seal hunt does not satisfy modern standards of humane killing as defined by folks like the American Veterinary Medical Association. Taken together, the facts of Canada's seal hunt raise a number of important ethical questions. Is it right, in the 21st century, to subsidize the killing of so many animals, many inhumanely, for non-essential products, while wastefully abandoning the majority of the carcasses and discarding most of the blubber?
In addition to factual issues, there are other things we know about, but the effects are unknown or difficult to predict precisely. Donald Rumsfeld might call these “known unknowns”. The most obvious and important known unknown today is global warming and its effect on harp seals and indeed hooded seals. The best study of these effects is on the impact of global warming on the formation of ice, upon which these seals depend for whelping and nursing, off Canada's east coast during February and March.
For most of the past 11 years, this region has experienced warmer than average winter temperatures and below average ice cover. While it is relatively easy to document the effects of global warming on ice conditions, it is more difficult to measure the precise impacts on seals.
A lack of suitable ice combined with violent storms and early breakup disrupts the seals' normal pupping season. This can result in increased abortions if female seals do not find ice upon which to give birth, or increased mortality of newborns if the ice breaks up before the end of nursing. For example, in 2002 DFO scientists assumed that 75% of the pups born in the Gulf of St. Lawrence died even before the hunt began. Such effects in any given year result in reduced cohort size, and have longer-term implications for population trends and population size.
If warm years with reduced ice coverage become the norm, as appears to be happening, there will be additional uncertainties. These include effects on the timing of reproduction, and the loss of critical breeding habitat. They also include effects on fish and invertebrates, leading to changes in the availability of prey for seals; and effects on seal condition, growth, reproductive success, and survival.
Managers have limited opportunities for dealing with the increased scientific and environmental uncertainty associated with global warming. But one thing management authorities can do, as recommended, for example, by World Wildlife Fund’s climate change program, is limit non-climate stresses, including over-hunting, on exploited species like harp seals that are being impacted by global warming.
WWF’s approach to building resilience to climate change is a good example of implementing a precautionary approach in conservation. Canada has included the precautionary approach in the preamble to the Oceans Act. The government claims that its management of the seal hunt is precautionary. It is not.
In modern precautionary approaches, total removals from a wild population are linked directly to the degree of scientific and environmental uncertainty. When uncertainty is high, the total allowable removals are reduced to ensure that wild populations are maintained at sufficiently high numbers that their future is not jeopardized.
In marked contrast, there is no mechanism in Canada’s seal hunt management plan linking total allowable catches to current scientific and environmental uncertainty. Furthermore, Canada’s management approach has never been subjected to the rigorous testing that is mandatory in the development of modern, precautionary management procedures.
A recent scientific study specifically examined the Canadian government’s approach for determining population status and trends for northwest Atlantic harp seals, and for providing advice on total allowable catches. It found that Canada’s management approach is likely to maintain a high total allowable catch, despite a declining population, and it risks seriously depleting the harp seal population by as much as 50% to 75% over the next 15 years.
That study recommended that Canada reduce the current TAC for harp seals to levels calculated from a well-established precautionary procedure, such as the potential biological removal method mandated for use with marine mammals under U.S. law. Such a step would drastically reduce Canada’s TAC for 2007. It would also dramatically reduce the likelihood that the population will be depleted by further over-hunting. It would provide some measure of resilience for the seals in the face of global warming, reduce the number of animals killed inhumanely, and reduce the amount of waste associated with Canada’s commercial seal hunt.
Thank you
