[LINK] "A Dying Living"

[rfmcdonald]

The National Post's Peter Kuitenbrouwer wrote recently about how the Newfoundland seal hunt is fading in the face of unfavourable economics, a changing environment, and political opposition.

The seal hunt in Newfoundland and Labrador, like maple syrup season in Quebec and eastern Canada, is a traditional rite of food-gathering that heralds the arrival of spring. Farmers tap maples before their fields thaw; fishermen hunt seals before sailing out to gather crab, turbot, lobster, smelt and shrimp. The supply is plentiful: Ottawa estimates the North Atlantic holds at minimum 6.9 million harp

seals, up from three million seals 15 years ago.

But a 40-year campaign attacking the seal hunt on moral grounds has turned many against it. And now, some fishermen and other Newfoundlanders accuse the federal Department of Fisheries of conspiring with the protesters to end the hunt. They point to new regulations enacted last year that require sealers to club seals with a hakapik -- a medieval club-type weapon the hunters had traded for a rifle a generation ago. The clubbing is back, by federal mandate, and it looks bad on video.

Lack of demand for pelts has reduced this year's seal hunt to a shadow of its former self.

Just four years ago, with buyers paying a record $105 for a seal pelt, the hunt attracted 340 vessels from all over Newfoundland, pouring money into the local economy for food, fuel, clothing and ammunition. This year only one processor is buying, paying $21.50 for a Grade A pelt, plus $2.50 per pelt for the blubber.

The weather, too, is strange: For the first time anyone can remember, no ice formed in Notre Dame Bay off Twillingate; vessels must travel to the northern tip of Newfoundland to find seals. There the boats found seals so plentiful that one boat, the Lady Victoria, caught its quota of 2,800 seals in less than a week, a record.

John Crosbie, former federal politician and current lieutenant-governor of Newfoundland and Labrador, is rather abrasive.

The flame of the Newfoundland iconoclast still burns bright in the old warrior. Hearing of our mission to see what was left of the seal hunt, Mr. Crosbie insisted on seeing us, promising: "I'll be wearing my goddamned sealskin underwear."

Mr. Crosbie's family made its fortune financing fishing and sealing expeditions that boasted high peril and low pay. On his wall hangs a picture of the SS Ungava, chartered in 1933 by Crosbie & Co., which brought in 49,600 seals, a record haul.

"There has been a seal fishery in Newfoundland for 3,000 years, long before the English got here," Mr. Crosbie says. "You became a man in those days when you went out on the seal hunt, and that's why we are not going to be bullied into giving it up. Today, people don't want to recognize their background. If Canadians haven't got backbone enough to withstand criticism, tough titty."

The possibility that Canadians have actually changed their minds about the seal hunt--indeed, that a majority of Canadians oppose the hunt, for good reasons--doesn't seem to come to his mind.