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AGAINST THE CURRENT
A Scapegoat
for Fools: Seals,
Cod and the Canadian Government
By Captain Paul Watson
"I would like to see
the six million seals, or whatever number is out there, killed
and sold, or destroyed or burned. I do not care what happens
to them. If there was a market for more seals, the commercial
sealers would be hunting and killing seals. The 'personal use'
sealers cannot sell them because the markets are not there. What
they want is the right to go out and kill the seals -- and the
more they kill, the better I will love it." ---Canadian
Government Official
The man who said this is Mr.
John Efford, the Minister of Fisheries for the east coast Canadian
province of Newfoundland. What Mr. Efford was referring to (on
May 4, 1998, in a statement in the Legislature) was his desire
to exterminate the harp seals off the eastern coast of Canada.
There are far fewer than six
million harp seals, but Mr. Efford has never been a man to let
facts get in the way of a political agenda. Sometimes he states
that there are eight million, or when he's particularly inclined
to a snit, he will state categorically that there are twelve
million. The numbers are irrelevant -- he wants them wasted,
every cute little innocent doe-eyed one of them. What Newfoundland
needs, he preaches, "...is a solution to deal with these
six million seals."
The word solution in Efford's
vocabulary can be interpreted here as "removal with very
extreme prejudice." The number chosen immediately recalled
another politician from the thirties who said, "If you tell
a lie often enough, people will begin to believe it to be truth."
Thus Efford is intent upon putting
the media philosophy of Joseph Goebbels into practice with his
tirelessly repeated lie that the harp seal is responsible for
the destruction of the Newfoundland cod fishery. Just exterminate
the harp seal, Efford proclaims, and the cod will return. "Kill
them [seals] and they [cod] will come back." The only problem
with Efford's wisdom is that scientific observation does not
back up his political scapegoating of the seal.
 The harp seal is no more of a threat
to the return of the cod than the common house cat. In fact,
a house cat is most likely a greater threat, considering that
house cats throughout the world consume much more fish than the
entire harp seal species. There are hundreds of millions of house
cats consuming hundreds of millions of tins of cat food made
from fish, but only between two million and six million seals,
depending on whose estimates one chooses to accept.
The problem is, however, people
choose to believe what they want to believe, and wily politicians
know that a lie, especially a promising lie, is a powerful tool
in the hands of a master liar.
John Efford is a wise fool: wise
in the ways of populist politics, foolish in his understanding
of the laws of ecology and his responsibility to the conservation
ethic. His boss is an even wiser and greater fool. Efford's boss
is Newfoundland Premier Brian Tobin, the former Canadian Federal
Minister of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO). Tobin has mastered the
lie to the point where he may well be the next Canadian Prime
Minister.
Back in 1994, as a Federal Minister,
Tobin dismissed the harp seal as a threat to the cod because
his department studies demonstrated that there was no relationship
between the lack of recovery of the cod and harp seal populations.
In fact, the scientists had stated that a healthy harp seal population
might even be a prerequisite for a healthy cod population.
Tobin loudly echoed his department's
policy at a media conference in Ottawa: "Man has been a
far greater predator on the stocks that disappeared. If we are
going to recover the cod, it's more important to stop the two-legged
predators and their pirate vessels than it is to go out and shoot
seals." Translated, this means that the average Canadian
respects the opinion of the scientists, happens to like seals,
and is not invested in the cod fishery. Thus telling the truth
about seals was the politically wise tactic for a federal politician.
Fast forward to December 18,
1995, Tobin is about to resign from the Federal government to
take a run for the premiership of the Province of Newfoundland.
This means that Tobin can now afford to kiss off the average
Canadian and move to appease the average Newfoundlander, who
hates the fishery biologists for telling them they can't fish.
They also hate seals because they believe seals eat all the fish,
and they are suffering massive unemployment due to the shutting
down of the destructive cod dragging fleets. The same Mr. Tobin
now says, "There is only one major player still fishing
the cod. His name is harp and his second name is seal."
The last thing that Tobin did
as federal minister of fisheries was re-open the commercial seal
hunt with a quota of 250,000 seals, giving Canada the distinction
of hosting the largest slaughter of a wildlife population in
the world . There are few markets for harp seal products, but
the government solved that problem by proclaiming subsidies to
the sealers and paying twenty cents per pound of seal meat and
fat as fodder. The seal fur market itself was, and remains flooded
with a million unsold pelts from Norway, taken back in the eighties.
The only marketable part of the seal is the penis, in demand
in China as some sort of sex potion.
When Tobin did run for Premier
of Newfoundland, he won. He said what the people wanted to hear,
namely that they, the Newfoundland fishers, did not wipe out
the cod. The real culprit was the harp seal, and all of our problems
would be solved if we would just exterminate the adorable little
thieves.
As an ocean activist, I acted
in 1993 to address the continuing rape of the cod by foreign
drag trawlers. With my ship and crew, I challenged the Cuban
fleet off the tail of the Grand Banks and was in the process
of doing the same with the Spanish fleet when the Canadian government
arrested me and charged me with interfering with foreign draggers
that had been licensed by the Canadian government. This was news
to the Newfoundland fishing community, idled by the shutdown
of the domestic cod fishery in 1992 by the very same government.
Two years later, in 1995, in
a CTV television debate between myself and Tobin, I argued that
if he were serious about protecting the fish, he would kick the
foreign draggers off the banks instead of posing as a tough guy
for the camera. I also advised him to make the banks draggerproof
by sinking old ships and dumping old cars to provide structure
for the fish. The wrecks will shred any drag trawl dropped.
The then Fisheries Minister laughed
and asked how we could expect to operate the Canadian dragger
fleet again in the future, after the cod recovered, if we made
the banks dragger proof. I realized that Tobin actually believed
his own myth that the cod would return; he hadn't learned a thing.
He would let those mad dog draggers loose again even if there
were a moderate recovery. Tobin argued that there was no future
in fishing by dorymen; only the draggers would provide the jobs
that Newfoundlanders needed. He had forgotten, or had never realized,
that it was the draggers that destroyed those jobs.
In the seven years that have
followed, little has changed. The foreign draggers are still
plundering the banks outside the 200-mile limit, and Canadian
corporations continue to buy cod from the foreign draggers as
Newfoundlanders continue to receive subsidies for not being able
to fish. Considering the time and tax dollars spent on welfare
for the fishers, each and every one of them could have been sent
to school and trained for alternative employment. But then they
would not be so disgruntled, and discontented citizens are more
easily manipulated than contented citizens. Besides, if they
were to get an education, they might be able to see through the
design of their elected officials.
Earlier this year, on April 25,
1999, Max Short, senior advisor to the Federal Minister of Fisheries
and Oceans David Anderson, stood before a deep-seas fisheries
conference in Marystown, Newfoundland, and - without naming names
- conveyed to attendees his admiration for the individuals responsible
for triggering the Great War and World War II: Gavrilo Princip
(the assassin of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria in 1914), and
Adolph Hitler, respectively.
Short noted that "it took
a crazy man" to ignite those conflicts, and he longed for
someone "with similar nerve" (as the Newfoundland Evening
Telegram discretely reported it) to put into motion the final
solution to the seal question. John Efford was quick to answer
the call with a demand to the Canadian Minister for Fisheries
and Oceans to raise the seal hunt quota above 275,000 and to
authorize a "cull" of two million seals for the year
2000. He stated that "mass slaughter is our only hope for
recovery of the cod." So once again we have politicians
attempting to solve the problem of wildlife destruction by, well,
destroying more wildlife.
Tobin, aspiring to be Prime Minister
of Canada, has had to tone down the anti-seal rhetoric himself.
Efford, aspiring to be Premier of Newfoundland, gains support
by targeting seals. Thus it is Efford who preaches "specicide"
while Tobin remains quietly in the background, content to let
his minister appear the fool in nine provinces, remaining the
hero in the tenth.
Are the seals preventing the
recovery of the cod? Absolutely, says Efford. Beyond a shadow
of a doubt, says Tobin. "Everyone knows the seal is to blame,"
echoed a Newfoundland fisherman spoke to on the dock at Petty
Harbor, Newfoundland.
Really?
"Certainly, no Department
of Fisheries scientist thinks the seal had anything to do with
the fishery's collapse." So says Dr. Jeffrey Hutchings,
a fishery biologist at Dalhousie University who has done work
for the department. So are seals inhibiting the cod's rate of
recovery? "I don't know. Nobody knows. We don't have the
data. And it bothers me that Tobin gives the impression to the
public that they do, when decisions are made under the guise
of science."
The international Society for
Marine Mammalogists, in a petition released in 1996, condemned
the Canadian government's re-opening of the seal hunt. The petition,
signed by ninety-seven biologists from fifteen countries, said,
"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 problem.
If fishing closures continue, the evidence indicates that stocks
will recover, and killing seals will not speed that process."
Unfortunately, it is not the
scientists who speak for the DFO. Jean-Eudes Hache, the senior
advisor on fisheries management for DFO, defends the re-opening
of the hunt and the rising annual quotas since 1996. "It's
not correct to say the science isn't there. It is there, but
this is a touchy issue, and always has been, because seals are
cute and get more attention. It raises all kinds of emotions-more
emotions than facts."
The "facts" according
to Hache can be found in a "peer reviewed" DFO departmental
study done in 1994 and released in 1996 that indicated a large
increase in the seal population and a calculated consumption
of 142,000 tons, or, 300 million young cod a year. The study
found these conclusions after killing and examining the stomach
contents of 5,000 seals.
According to harp seal expert
and marine mammalogist Dr. David Lavigne, the report does not
hold water. "The number of cod they say are eaten is based
on the seal population, which they admit to only estimating.
That study they themselves described as a preliminary one was
'peer reviewed' only inside the DFO, which is no peer review
at all. If they want a real outside peer review, they should
go to the Society for Marine Mammalogy."
Lavigne has created a food-chain
chart that illustrates a complex interaction of more than eighty
animals and plants existing on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland.
The harp seal and the cod are only two for these species. According
to Dr. Lavigne, yes, harp seals do utilize young cod for 3 percent
of their diet. Of greater concern should be the fact that many
of the other fish that comprise the remaining 97 percent of the
seal's diet are themselves predators on young cod. Remove the
harp seal, and the return of the cod could be hindered - not
helped - by a significant increase in predatory fish hunting
for cod.
It makes sense to me. I'm not
a marine biologist, but I am a marine historian. I've read the
logbooks of the early explorers and the early sealers.
Captain Jacques Cartier, credited
with being the first European to set foot in what is now Canada,
described the Grand Banks and the Gulf of St. Lawrence as brimming
with life. The cod was so populous, according to Cartier, that
the very bottom of the banks was carpeted with giant cod. There
was no need for a net, wrote Carter. A wicker basket was sufficient.
Throw it in, and it would come up brimming with fish.
At that time in 1535 there were
an estimated thirty million seals, and yet, miraculously, there
was not shortage of fish. An incredibly large seal population
and a never-again-recorded number of cod co-existed. How could
this have happened if the harp seal, as Efford describes it,
is a voracious consumer of cod? The answer, of course, is that
nature had established a balance, protecting diversity through
the interdependence of all the species co-existing on the Grand
Banks and the Gulf.
The three primary laws of ecology
were in harmony. The laws of interdependence, the law of biodiversity,
and the law of finite resources. The eco-system was so healthy
that for 400 years, the hook and line dorymen and the Grand Banks
schooners had a minimal impact on the numbers.
What changed this situation was
the introduction of the heavy gear technology within the last
thirty years. The giant draggers with their gargantuan nets began
to scour the banks, gulping everything in their paths and smashing
the protective cover, the rocks, plants, and fragile submarine
landscape of the bottom. The cod were dragged to the surface
by the hundreds of thousands of tons. The fishing corporations
made incredible profits, and this led to a greed to take even
more.
The fleet of Canadian draggers
exceeded the tonnage of the Canadian Navy. The draggers began
to drop through the winter ice, and they discovered the spawning
grounds, hauling up fish before they could reproduce, without
a thought for tomorrow. The Canadian and Newfoundland governments
went along with the corporations. The tax money flowed into government
coffers. People were employed, the processing plants worked round
the clock, and that was all that was important to consider until
the next election.
The inshore Newfoundland fishermen
warned the governments a decade in advance. No one listened to
them. They were dorymen, mere peasants compared to the trawler
bosses. They would not be needed again until, well, later, when
the government would need a poster boy for the world to feel
sorry for. Because in 1992, the draggers returned empty, and
the Grand Banks cod fishery, the greatest fishery in the entire
history of the world, was done. It was over and gone, and the
like of it will never be seen again.
Politicians are nothing if not
versatile, and they were quick to replace cod fishery dollars
with government handouts and a promise that the cod would return-if
only the real culprit for the demise of the cod could be removed.
Thus the harp seal became the scapegoat, the animal that would
have to die to allow the blame to be shifted from those who were
really responsible-the companies, politicians, bureaucrats, media,
and the ignorant public.
Earlier this year Efford released
video footage of hundreds of cod littering the bottom of a Newfoundland
Bay. The stomachs had been ripped out and the carcasses lay rotting.
Divers were shown examining the fish. "That is all the evidence
that we need," roared Efford. "The seals wasted these
fish." However, according to Dr. David Lavigne, whose credentials
as a harp seal expert far exceed those of the minister, there
has never been any observable behavior of harp seals eating only
the stomachs of the fish and leaving the bodies to rot. According
to Lavigne there wasn't even evidence that harp seals were in
the area. Not a one was seen.
"Politics," says Lavigne,
"is the father of the lie. Everything that Tobin said "when
he resurrected the seal hunt) is not what his own scientists
said. They do good work but they're gagged. One of them I know
who had the temerity to tell the press that what's happened to
the fish had nothing to do with seals but was simply overfishing
was reprimanded and resigned from the department."
I was so convinced that the seals
could not have done such damage that I authorized the Sea Shepherd
Conservation Society to offer a reward of $25,000 Canadian for
any film or video of a harp seal in the act of ripping a stomach
out of a cod. It's been six months, and we still have the reward
in place without receiving a single challenge.
Peter Meisenheimer, a research
scientist at the International Marine Mammal Association, expressed
a serious concern over the fact that politics dictated the "science"
at DFO. This was illustrated succinctly in the early 1990s when
former fisheries minister John Crosbie accused DFO scientists
of being "demented." "They don't have to deal
with the economic, social, and cultural effects of reduced cod
quotas. I do," stated Crosbie.
When it comes to politics, ideals,
science, and practicality are rapidly thrown out the window in
the interest of expediency. To be a politician in Newfoundland
you have to believe that seals are destroying the cod. As a result,
even the Newfoundland Green Party supports the slaughter. In
July, a group of Newfoundland Greens under the leadership of
a sweating, sealskin-coat-wearing Jason Crummey staged a protest
in St. Johns, Newfoundland. Crummey said "We're not just
doing this to thumb our noses at the Green Party of Canada for
not supporting a seal hunt. Unless the Green Party of Canada
listens to us and supports a hunt, we don't have a chance of
getting a single candidate elected in Newfoundland-not to mention
being taken seriously."
Must the seals die for the politicians,
even the Greens, to be taken "seriously"? It appears
so. The thousands of Newfoundlanders put out of work need an
endless supply of political bones to be thrown to them so they
can continue the illusion that they will go fishing again.
Not all Newfoundlanders are taken
in by the political machinations. Twillingate sealer Gary Troake
knows the truth and expressed it in an interview with Toronto
Star reporter Lynda Hurst. "Tobin just wants seals out of
the system because of pressure from fishing countries and from
fishing communities here. Not all Newfoundlanders are sealers,
you know. We're mainly in the north, so a lot of them down south
will believe the big lie that seals destroyed the cod. Our overfishing-our
own greed-killed it. You can't deal with the mismanagement of
the fish by mismanaging the seal. I sent a letter to Tobin demanding
that seal stocks be treated with the same respect as cod. Then
I realized what I'd said and put in brackets 'bad example'."
Efford will probably not get
his wish to have two million seals destroyed in the year 2000.
He will get a compromise, and the federal government, to appease
him, will undoubtedly raise the quota to above 300,000. Canadian
naturalist Farley Mowat, who has studied the history of the seal
hunt, believes that the kill is always three to one. That means
two lost beneath the ice for every seal officially taken in the
quota. If so, a quota of 300,000 will mean over 900,000 killed.
A kill just short of a million,
and it will happen again in 2001 and 2002.
One way or the other, Efford
will get what he wants. The Newfoundland voter will love him
for it, and he will most likely follow Tobin as Premier. Every
aspiring politician desires a scapegoat and every successful
politician has found one. Tobin and Efford have found theirs.
The harp seal hunt may be economically unimportant; however,
its political value is now higher than ever.
I wonder what the politicians
will use as an excuse after the harp seal is gone? The whales
maybe. Perhaps the dolphins. That will be the challenge for a
future politician. As for Efford and Tobin, they will give it
nary a thought. They will have achieved their ambitions through
the blood sacrifice of the harp seal.
SOURCES:
Quotes from Green Party member
Jason Crummey from the St. John's Evening Telegram (July 11,
1999).
Quotes from Max Short from the St. John's Evening Telegram (April
26, 1999).
Quotes attributed to Dr. David Lavigne, Gary Troake, Peter Meisenheimer,
Jean-Etudes Hache, Brian Tobin and Dr. Jeffrey Hutching from
the Toronto Star.
Article by Lynda Hurst.
Interviews between Paul Watson and Farley Mowat, Dr. David Lavigne
and Newfoundland fishermen by Paul Watson.
Opening quote by John Efford from the Newfoundland Legislature
(May 4, 1998).
Quotes from the debate between Paul Watson and Brian Tobin from
CTV.
Ref. Sea of Slaughter by Farley Mowat.
This article appeared in the
Autumn 1999 issue of Ocean Realm magazine and appears
here by permission.
P.O. Box 2616, Friday Harbor,
WA 98250 (USA) Tel: 360-370-5650 Fax: 360-370-5651
Copyright © 2004 Sea Shepherd
Conservation Society. All rights reserved.
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