Horror on Hay Island

February 24, 2008

By Rebecca Aldworth

This spring marks a macabre anniversary for me: It is the tenth year I have observed commercial seal hunting in Canada at close range. In that decade, I’ve seen things that still haunt me every day and night. But nothing could have prepared me for what I just witnessed in Nova Scotia.

Two weeks ago, the government of Nova Scotia and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans opened a protected nature reserve to commercial seal hunters. Fishermen were authorized to club 2,500 grey seals [PDF] to death on Hay Island, a part of the protected Scaterie Island Wilderness Area off Cape Breton.

The Peace Before the Horror

I and my colleagues from Humane Society International and the Humane Society of the United States—along with a representative from the Atlantic Canadian Anti-Sealing Coalition—traveled to the site of the massacre by Zodiac.

Before the hunters arrived, Hay Island was a stunning, wild, and windswept vista. A tiny plot of land off the larger Scaterie Island, it faces directly onto the Atlantic Ocean. Its stone beaches surround grassy, snow-covered hills—the habitat of grey seal mothers and their pups.

Everywhere across the island, seal pups nursed from their mothers, their soft calls drowned out by the sounds of the ocean waves crashing onto the rocky shores in the distance. Some of the newborn pups were covered in white fur; others, a few days older, had already moulted their white coats. The moulted pups have the most valuable skins, and the hunters meant to kill them. 

The Slaughter Begins

On the opening day of the seal hunt, we arrived at Hay Island after the killing had already begun. We climbed out of our Zodiac^TM onto the rocky beach, facing a high ridge beyond which we could not see. As we clambered over it, we noticed a steel pail in which sealers had left wooden bats covered in blood—an ominous indicator of what lay ahead. Directly behind the bloody pail lay a newborn whitecoat seal pup, crying pitifully. She was terrified and bewildered, unable to comprehend the violence happening around her. Her calls struck a chord deep within me. There is something about the misery of a newborn creature, confronted with violence even adult humans cannot stand to watch, that defines exactly why commercial seal hunting must end.

Herded Toward Doom

As I looked up, it took a full minute for me to understand what I was seeing in front of me. Hunters had herded moulted pups, newborn seals, and mothers together into groups. They bashed the moulted pups with their crude wooden bats, slicing them open with box cutters. Inches away, the mothers tried to put themselves between their babies and the sealers, but they were no match for these men armed with wooden bats.

“Come here, little buddy, I have something for you,” yelled out one sealer as he ran directly at a terrified pup huddling in a crevice beside a rock. Without a second of hesitation, the sealer raised his bloody bat and struck the seal pup. The repeated thuds of the clubs against the skulls of the grey seal pups sounded out across the island, constant and sickening.

Soon, the grass and snow of Hay Island was covered in vast pools of blood. The surviving newborn pups were moving miserably through the carnage, red blood smeared across their white fur. Bloody trails led away from the killing sites to the areas where dead pups were being winched onto a sealing boat stationed just off the island.

A Sight Hard to Bear

I saw my horror at the scene reflected in the some of the faces of the government officials there. No one could watch this brutality and remain unaffected. Even the sealers seemed to realize there was something wrong with what they were doing; they would deliberately stand in front of our cameras to prevent us from filming as they smashed in the skulls of the baby seals.

I moved through the killing fields, apologizing to the surviving pups, over and over again. The site of their home, their sanctuary, being turned into an open air slaughterhouse by these ruthless invaders was too much to bear. What had once been one of Nova Scotia’s wilderness treasures had been destroyed by the commercial sealing industry.

It is unthinkable that the Canadian government is allowing grey seals to be slaughtered commercially. By 1949, commercial hunting had almost wiped out this population, and it has only begun to recover to any real extent in recent years. While the Department of Fisheries and Oceans has attempted to portray this recovery as a population increase, it is hard for any population not to increase when it is starting at close to zero.

Fishermen have long scapegoated grey seals for the impact of destructive commercial fishing methods on fish stocks. They say that grey seals are preventing fish stocks from recovering, despite the fact that there is not a shred of evidence anywhere in the world that this is the case. But despite this, the Canadian government allows fishermen to promote the myth that killing grey seals will somehow help the ecosystem to recover. And that is exactly how the fishing industry and the government of Nova Scotia have tried to sell this devastating slaughter to the public.

But it won’t work. We will hold the government of Nova Scotia and the Department of Fisheries and Oceans accountable for their behaviour. The footage we filmed is being provided to governments around the world to show the depths to which the Canadian government will sink to appease the fishing industry lobby. We will not forget the suffering of the grey seals. And the horrible deaths of these seal pups over the past two weeks will not be in vain.

A Wake-Up Call

A local supporter from Cape Breton remarked to me after our first day of filming the grey seal slaughter, “I’ve always thought the grey seal hunt would end the harp seal hunt in Canada.” She believes the cruelty of this slaughter, which occurs in areas people can see it, will wake up Atlantic Canadians to the reasons why all commercial seal hunting must end.

She may well be right.

As we prepare to depart for the much larger harp seal hunt just a few weeks from now, I hold that thought in my mind.

The end is coming for the commercial sealing industry in Canada. Allowing the grey seal slaughter to happen in the Hay Island sanctuary was the biggest mistake the Canadian government could have made. They will live to regret it.

Seal Hunt 2008 Overview