Rebecca Aldworth, executive director of the Canadian chapter of Humane Society International is calling on Canadians to defend grey seals from a federal government that is bent on killing them by the thousands. She was reacting to a new report from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans recommending the slaughter of well over 73,000 grey seals over a five-year period.
“It is up to Canadian voters and the Canadian public as a whole to defend our wild animals from government policies that exist only for short term political gain,” Aldworth told the Coast during a telephone interview from her office in Toronto. She noted that the fishing industry has been putting sustained pressure on federal politicians to authorize such a cull.
“Canadians have got to get beyond the political rhetoric, read the science, learn the true role of seals in the ecosystem and speak up for these animals who cannot speak for themselves,” she added.
The latest DFO report recommends a five-year experiment to find out if killing thousands of grey seals would lead to a recovery of cod stocks in the southern Gulf of St. Lawrence. The report recommends killing 73,000 of the animals as well as thousands more to offset natural increases in the population.
“The recommended removal of 73,000+ grey seals will not lead to serious harm to the grey seal population in Atlantic Canada,” the report says. “Substantial removals of grey seals will reduce natural mortality on large cod.”
However, a Coast cover story in July quoted several local scientists who expressed doubts about the effectiveness and desirability of such a cull. The Coast had obtained a federal consultant’s report on the feasibility and logistics of a $35 million, five-year plan to slaughter 220,000 grey seals on Sable Island.
Aldworth, who has been opposing commercial sealing since the late 1990s, visited Nova Scotia in February to observe and photograph the killing of about 100 grey seals on Hay Island in a protected wilderness area off the coast of Cape Breton.
“It was a truly brutal slaughter to observe” she says. “They were testing out a new low-velocity gun and many seals were shot and were still thrashing around and had to be clubbed and shot again. Baby seals were both clubbed and shot to death just inches away from each other.”
Aldworth says she’s hoping photos of the slaughter will convince the Nova Scotia government to stop the killing in an area that’s supposed to be a nature reserve.
She says the latest recommendation to kill more than 73,000 seals could lead to a massive slaughter on Sable Island, the world’s largest grey seal breeding ground.
“I have a certain level of frustration reading through this report. It is very clear that the cause of the cod stock collapse in the 1990s was human overfishing. But what the report doesn’t mention is that when you fish a species to commercial extinction, there is every chance it will not recover,” Aldworth says.
“Most good scientists today are talking about a lack of biomass in our ocean. They’re talking about there not being enough life left in that ocean to sustain a recovery of the cod population and other vulnerable groundfish species. Blaming this on seals is illogical and it’s not supported by the best available science.”
This article appears in Mar 17-23, 2011.
Maybe I’m just fishing here…
None of the scientists or government officials have made a causal link between the Cod stock and the seal population. That has simply been inferred.
Here’s my observation: if you decimate that shark population as bi-catch in long-lining activity you destroy the seal’s natural predators.
It logically can’t be an over supply of food that is causing the growth in the seal population (if there really is growth) because there is no extra food supply… the cod are not there to eat.
It can’t be the lack of a seal hunt because the seal hunt was a managed cull that was calculated by DFO not to have a material impact on the seal population.
So what’s left? What has changed?
If we look up the food chain and not down we know that the shark population has been decimated and left to rot on the sea as long-line by-catch. It was the sharks that kept the seal population in check and has been for thousands of years.
Want to do an “experiment”? Stop the killing of sharks as bi-catch in the long-line fishery. See how that works out. At very least it’s a stop killing approach instead of a kill more approach.
This is obviously politically motivated. It is a make-work project for sealers disgruntled by the collapse of the commercial sealing industry. Sealers will be paid to cull these seals, and that money will come from Canadian taxpayers.
It’s obvious upon reading the report DFO Science is ignoring other causes of cod depletion. It admits it’s not considering them, preferring instead to focus on seals on the off-chance killing a large number of grey seals might help cod.
And what happens in five years when the experiment has proven a dismal failure and cod stocks have shown no sign of recovery? Will DFO then look at the many other causes, or will they simply declare they need to kill more seals?
The timing of this report is interesting, with a federal election looming. What’s that sound? I do believe it’s the sound of Atlantic Canadian fishing/sealing votes being bought. Cha-ching…
The DFO Science Advisory Report on the impacts of grey seals on Gulf and Scotian Shelf cod does not seem to deal with the issue of statistical power in detecting an impact of culling grey seals on the survival rate of cod.
Any such “experiment” if one can call it that, would be plagued by a number of uncertainties, including uncertainty in the consumption rate of cod by seals, uncertainty in the impact of other predators on cod, and uncertainty in estimating the mortality rate of cod from survey data, particularly at low population size.
Standard practice in experimental design where there is a lot of uncertainty would be to determine through simulation on the computer the number of seals that would have to be killed in order to see a significant change in survival rate at an alpha=0.05 significance level.
My guess is that the “experiment” lacks any statistical power for detecting an effect and that is why it is not reported in the scientific document. Typically a policy decision is made by DFO senior managers and then the science is expected to provide support for the decision. In this case the “scientific advice” attempts to provide such support without the basis of a competent statistical analysis.
Surprise surprise to see another mouthpiece (Bridget) comment on this piece. Both her and Rebecca and all the rest use their own ‘facts’ to support their ’cause’. I’m so sick of their blathering on with incorrect information to suit their own purposes…”oh the poor whitecoats…the cruel seal harvesters”. Get your facts straight honey, the ban on slaughtering white coats has been in place now for years. Blah blah blah is all I hear when any of you start.
Ms. Vista,
I’ve read the interesting article a couple times now and Bridget’s comments and I just can’t connect your comment to any of this.
If you were in charge of DFO or could effect real change in our seas today what would you propose be done?
What’s the best plan for the long term in your view?
What about cows, pigs, chickens, turkeys, etc.? Not cute enough to hold protests about?