“I want to see this barbaric massacre stopped before I die.”
—Brigitte Bardot
Canada has been notorious for its harp seal slaughter, massacring hundreds of thousands of seals for years in the name of the fur trade. Despite world outrage and public outcry, killing continued. These remarkable pinnipeds have been slaughtered for nothing more than fashion items for years. In 2009 the European Union banned the export of seal fur exempting native people from the practice of taking seals, often under three months, which would have been taboo to the Indigenous people. For hundreds of years, the Inuit have had no choice but to survive largely on marine mammals.
But Europeans and Americans have inflicted enormous pain on seals for decades, not to survive but to look chic or in style. Style based on blood, massacre and cruelty. In 2006 alone 325,000 seals were killed for the fashion industry, a massacre of the innocent if there ever was one. Or as some Canadians would say, the 1.5 tons of fish that a seal consumes, puts it in direct competition with fishermen, especially those who depend on cod. But the true cause of the depletion of the fish population is simple: overfishing. As climate change has exacerbated the melting of sea ice the seal populations have decreased accordingly, by some estimates by as much as 6 percent every year.
Paul McCartney, Sara McLachlan, Pamela Anderson and others have expressed their outrage and concern for the animals’ welfare and future. Brigitte Bardot, the most vocal celebrity of all exclaimed,” I am pleading with you. This will likely be my last visit to Canada before I die. I want to see this barbaric massacre stopped before I die."
It is the same kind of tasteless depravity that governed the plume trade when 5 million birds a year were being killed for feathers, birds such as great egrets, flamingoes and roseate spoonbills and even peafowl all to adorn women’s hats and even British army hats. Even Florida’s shore birds, some 95 percent of them were eradicated. Extermination in the name of fashion. Many of those birds came from the Everglades, which would have been rendered into nearly a birdless glade if it hadn’t been for the American Ornithologists Union and the Florida state legislature in 1901 and eventually Theodore Roosevelt’s executive order in 1903 to protect egrets and other birds from the plume industry. Pelican Island was established as the first National Wildlife Refuge for birds just in time. Not enough effort to stop the extinction of the passenger pigeon whose last member died around the time of the beginning of WW1, an amazing coincidence if ever there was one. Their numbers once blocked out the sun in the tens of millions. Some say their population was once around a billion. Then they were exterminated. Not one survives. It is a stark omen of how humanity was about to embark in its dismantling of the biosphere over the 20th century.
Further down the Atlantic in a vastly different ecosystem, the same kind of violence is perpetuated on Namibia’s fur seals. There are now 26 international bans on seal products which has resulted in a 90 percent reduction in seal mortality and the salvation of 4 million harp seal pups, most under the age of three months.
Namibia whose beaches boast some of the most awe inspiring sand dunes on Earth on the Skeleton coast harbors a remarkable population of Cape fur seals, a colony called Cape Cross, which along with 24 other colonies en route to South Africa, boasts over 1.7 million individuals. The question is why Namibia still slaughters seals — 80,000 a year, among them 6,000 bulls. Last year an estimated 7,000 Cape fur seals were discovered dead at a breeding colony in central Namibia.
Conservationist Naude Dreyer of the charity Ocean Conservation Namibia began noticing dead seals littering the sandy beaches of the Pelican Point colony near Walvis Bay city in September. Underfed pups and climate change working in tandem. Then in the first two weeks of October he found large numbers of seal fetuses at the colony, Tess Gridley from the Namibian Dolphin Project told AFP by phone. But the reason for the commercial hunt is simple. Oil. Oil derived from the blubber of seals is exported to none other than China, over 30,000 gallons every year.
And the pelts, about 400,000 in the last decade go to Turkey for coats, “wild fur coats,” which sell from anywhere from $3,000 to $30,000. Greece also imported seal skins, but the worldwide market is narrowing.
Namibia, Greenland and Canada are among the last places where seals are still “harvested.” Seals could become threatened if the market isn’t closed. Pat Dickens, the main voice behind Seals of Namibia founded in 2010 says, “If CITES is serious about improving animal welfare standards in trade, then it really should raise the issue of the Namibian seal hunt.”
That genitalia, powdered bull penises, sold to China as aphrodisiacs, hai you shen, should still be sold in the 21st century to improve virility is stunning. The question is not that virility is so sought after, how the massacre of a critical species for the ecosystem can be destroyed all in the name of commerce. Bull seal penises can sell for $2,000 a pound. That seal pups should continue to be shot in the head should awaken public outrage, but most people have not a clue about this murder on the African coast. The ivory trade and the market for rhino horn and lion trophies have been in the public conscience much more. It is time for the massacre of a genuinely irreplaceable sea mammal that so moved Brigitte Bardot to come to the forefront of public outcry.
Namibia should know better than to allow this kind of monstrosity to occur. Its 1962 Animal Protection Act should have outlawed this egregious practice. The hunting season from July to November gives no reprieve to the seals as the larger, stronger seals are targeted. The smaller, weaker ones are the ones left to linger in the genetic pool, impairing the overall population. Whatever the quota, the barbarity of Namibia’s seal hunt has to come to an end. Drowning in fish nets, entanglement and the illegal killing by fishermen is bound to catch up with the seal population. Those parameters and climate change which is affecting their feeding habits. Seal tourism which includes swimming with seals, would bring in 300 percent more revenue than seal killing. Does humanity need to continue butchering these superb oceanic beings or can we say, enough to the massacre, enough of the pulverizing of those creatures that bridge land to sea. The images of 160 workers with spiked clubs hammering in the heads of young seal pups hasn’t been enough to stop this practice. The cull of the innocent has to stop.
Photo credit: Lysander Christo
If Namibia wants to be a leader in green and blue energy, as it seems to be wanting to do, it must address the proper conservation of what is unique to Namibia. Shameful practices that should be banned have no place in the extraordinarily fragile biosphere of today. On the heels of the Cop26 in Glasgow, Namibia needs to honor its wildlife and reverse course on its yearly seal apocalypse and do it before climate change, altered sea temperatures and diminishing fish stocks imperil its wildlife populations forever.
Seals, rhinos, elephants, lions, even fish are not harvested. They are not fruit trees. They are butchered. The pools of blood spilled is a stain on the body of a country that boasts the oldest desert on Earth, a country unlike any other. If we take wildlife for granted and continue to treat them as things, one day there will be no large mammals left on Earth. It will be a world not worth living in. Nor will we be able to. We need to heed the warnings of the 6th extinction upon us and reverse course while we still can. Willful, deliberate slaughter of a species should not and cannot be countenanced anymore.
It is time Namibia’s seals be allowed to live.
Learn more about Cyril Christo and Marie Wilkinson's work at their website.
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