Urge Canada to end its commercial seal hunt that beats pups to death

UPDATE: (3/22/2024): Canada’s new Department of Fisheries and Oceans Minister, Diane Lebouthillier, is planning to expand Canada’s commercial seal industry by marketing seal meat as a seafood delicacy to Canadians.

Thousands of baby seals are beaten to death and skinned alive in Canada every year in the largest annual slaughter of marine mammals on the planet.  

This violent, cruel, and unsustainable Canadian tradition results in the deaths of up to 400,000 seals a year, 97% of the seals killed are just babies. These innocent seal pups are typically under three months old when they are murdered for the senseless greed of unfeeling humans who covet their soft skins. The Canadian government allows seal hunters to kill these precious babies with wooden clubs, ice pick style clubs, and guns.

The hunters have a fee deducted from the price of the babies’ skins for each bullet hole so they often allow these weeks old sentient beings to suffer long and excruciating deaths from poorly aimed gunshot wounds while their helpless mothers look on. Scientific reports on the hunt have found that the way these babies are killed violates Canada’s animal welfare standards and that in 42% of cases studied there was insufficient evidence of cranial injury to the clubbed seals to guarantee they were unconscious during skinning.

The people who participate in this unthinkable violence against seal pups mostly live in Newfoundland, yet income from the seal slaughter represents less than 1% of the province’s economy, and of over half a million Newfoundlanders only 6,000 heartless people participate in this atrocity. This hunt brings shame on the good people of Newfoundland, only benefits a selfish few and costs the Canadian taxpayers millions of dollars a year. This hunt represents the worst of humanity and it must be stopped.

Please join Species Unite in calling on the Minister of Fisheries, Forestry and Agriculture to put an end to this shameful and bloody slaughter before the harp seal population is irrevocably damaged by this senseless cruelty.