This footage is from the 2005 commercial seal hunt in Canada. As you can see, sealers are not stopping to ensure that the animals are dead before moving on to the next one. That's a violation of marine mammal regulations. As you can see, this is not what we would call regulation killing. We are now in 2006, almost a year later, and no charges have been laid even though the Department of Fisheries and Oceans has had this footage for almost a year. As you can see, animals are clubbed to death in front of each other. They are often left, literally wounded, suffering, and choking on their own blood.
This seal was left for 90 minutes before the sealer finally finished him off by spiking him through the skull with the spike end of a hakapik. Those of you who know sealing know that this is not the way this implement is supposed to be used.
These animals are left wounded, conscious, and suffering on the ice floes. The argument that I hear from the Canadian government and from sealers themselves is that this is the 2% to 3% of any industry that operates incorrectly. All I can tell you is that I've filmed this hunt for eight years. This is every boat that I film and every sealer I follow across the ice floes, in every direction I look.
This hunt is completely unregulated. It happens from 70 miles offshore up to 150 miles offshore, in extreme weather conditions and on unstable ice floes. These sealers literally compete against each other for quotas. They're killing as many animals as quickly as they can. I want you to think about this. In Newfoundland, over 140,000 animals are normally killed in less than two days. When you think about the scale of that hunting and what kind of humane considerations are taken into account when working in these conditions....
I'm showing this to you—and it's not easy to watch—because it is not shown in Canada on our media. It is shown in the rest of the world, and that's why many nations are taking steps to shut down their trade in seal products. Around the world, these images have been shown on television stations, and they're not our images that are being shown. Media from all over the world have come up and filmed this hunt for themselves. More European parliamentarians have viewed this hunt firsthand than have Canadian members of Parliament, and that is a disgrace for Canada.
These images are real and they happen every single year at the commercial seal hunt, and it's a level of cruelty no thinking, compassionate human being, no Canadian, could ever accept if they saw it for themselves. I say that as somebody who grew up in Newfoundland. I say that every Newfoundlander I know would stand up and speak up against this if they knew it was happening on the ice floes.
I will close by thanking you for the opportunity to appear here today. I'm going to submit to you some information on the economics of the commercial seal hunt, and I hope we'll have an opportunity to discuss that during the questions and answers.
This is a hunt that doesn't need to occur. It accounts for less than 1% of the gross domestic product of Newfoundland and less than 3% of the commercial fishery. The people who do it in Newfoundland brought home, on average, under $1,500 each in 2005. This is an industry we could easily phase out and replace in a heartbeat if we chose to do it, and I hope you will do so.
As you know, this industry costs us far more than it's worth. An ongoing boycott of Canadian seafood products is beginning to impact the value of Canadian fish exports to the United States. In the 20 months since the boycott of Canadian seafood was launched in 2005, the value of Canadian snow crab exports to the United States has declined by over $330 million. While we are not claiming sole responsibility for that decline, we believe the seafood boycott is a significant factor.
At HSUS, we would love the opportunity to call off the boycott and work with the Canadian government to find viable solutions for the people in outports of Newfoundland and in the rest of the country who are involved in this commercial seal hunt. We can't do that until the federal government works with us to find an end and put a final end to killing seals in Canada commercially.
Thank you.