No Fish? Hunt Seals!

The cod fishery, and the thousands of jobs that depended on it, disappeared virtually overnight. Now, because cod stocks have failed to recover, the government's "common sense" rationale is this: it must be because harp seals are eating all the cod and preventing their recovery. And using that logic, the Canadian government has justified increasing the annual hunt in seals to 350,000.

The claim that seals eat too many cod is the same flawed argument that whaling nations use to call for the resumption of commercial whaling -- "whales eat too many fish." There is no science to back the government's argument that seals are preventing the recovery of the cod. In 1995, 97 scientists signed a petition on the subject: "All scientific efforts to find an effect of seal predation on Canadian groundfish stocks have failed to show any impact. Overfishing remains the only scientifically demonstrated conservation problem related to fish stock collapse."

The Real Culprit

Compare a seal's appetite to that of a factory trawler – a fishing vessel that can haul up as much as 200 tons of fish in an hour. Now imagine those factory trawlers fishing cod around the clock for four or five decades – assisted by large subsidies from the government. Considering that cod comprises about 3 percent of the average harp seal's diet, which one is to blame for the collapse of the cod fishery?

Having overseen and subsidized the destruction of the Grand Banks fishery from factory trawlers, the Canadian government now pays out billions of dollars of taxpayers' money in social security to out-of-work fishermen and communities in Newfoundland. Rather than recognize it caused the collapse of the ecosystem, it has been busy looking for a new scapegoat.

But the human greed that caused the collapse of the cod fishery should not be an excuse to start pushing another species in the same ecosystem to dangerously low levels. You don't manage an ecosystem by beating it to death.

Take Action

Tell Canadian Prime Minister Martin to stop this indefensible hunt.