Each year, tens of thousands of harp seals are killed, 98 percent of these being pups under three months of age. Pups are routinely hooked in the eye, cheek or mouth to avoid damaging the fur, before being drug across the ice. Some are shot, often from a moving boat, leaving many wounded to die slowly. Because of such practices, seal deaths are thought to be much higher than reported, due to animals being wounded and then slipping beneath the ice to die slowly.

Seals are killed primarily for their fur, as well as a small market for seal oil and seal penises in China as an aphrodisiac. There is virtually no market for seal meat, so most seal pups are skinned and left to rot on the ice.



Practices in the seal hunt have been determined by veteranarians to be unacceptably cruel. Sealers drag concious seals across the ice with hooks, shoot them and leave them to die, and skin seals alive.

In 2001, a report by an independent team of veterinarians who studied the hunt concluded that governmental regulations regarding humane killing were neither being respected nor enforced, and that the seal hunt failed to comply with Canada's basic animal welfare standards. Shockingly, the veterinarians found that in 42 percent of the cases they studied, the seals had likely been skinned alive while conscious.(HSUS)



There will be no justice as long as man will stand with a knife or with a gun and destroy those who are weaker than he is. ~Isaac Bashevis Singer



The seal hunt is not economically important. Sealing is an off-season activity that makes up a fraction of fishermen's income. 90 percent of sealer's live in Newfoundland, yet it is estimated only 6000 fishermen participate in the seal hunt there each year. In fact, the Canadian government subsidizes the seal hunt.

In 2004, more than $400,000 was provided by the Canadian government to companies for the development of seal products, and as recently as April 2007, the Canadian Coast Guard—at the taxpayer's expense—broke through the ice for the sealing vessels as it does each year. In 2007, the Canadian Coast Guard estimates that it spent an additional $3.5 million rescuing sealing vessels.(HSUS)

For more information, visit:
HSUS: Protect Seals
Harpseals.org