I
am doing something I oughtn't to be doing - walking on water.
Although there are several inches of frozen north Atlantic under my
feet, I cannot help but think that I am violating some fundamental
principle of physics. The journalist who broke through the ice shortly
after we stepped out of the helicopter was lucky; the backpack in which
he was carrying a box lunch and some extra clothing caught on the edge
of the hole and kept him from disappearing altogether. With 30 lbs. of
camera gear strapped to my back, however, I would have plummeted into
the abyss and vanished into inner space as surely as the unfortunate
astronaut whom Hal, the malevolent computer in 2001, A Space Odyssey,
jettisoned mercilessly into outer space.
It's the first week in March. I am about 20 miles
due west of the Magdalen Islands in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. All around
me are several dozen adult, female harp seals and their pups, some
napping, some nursing, some skittering about on their bellies, others
popping up through holes in the ice like whiskered jack-in-the-boxes.
Just two feet from me, a harp seal pup, or whitecoat, stirs from its
sound repose. It whimpers plaintively, stretches, then lifting its head
slightly, it looks at me passively through coal black eyes that barely
poke out of a ruff of pure white fur. Then it yawns again, drops its
head, and its eyes fall shut even before its chin touches the snow. It
is unconcerned by my presence though, dressed in a bright orange
survival suit, I am as alien to this ice floe as an astronaut on the
moon. I sit down in the snow beside the whitecoat, remove a mitten, and
allow myself a single stroke of its thick, silky, brilliant, coat.
Imagine petting a cloud.
Alas, though it protects the little seal from the
arctic cold, that luxurious pelt is also its undoing. As coveted as the
Golden Fleece, like that mythical sheepskin, once possessed, the magic
of a harp seal's pelt becomes its curse. It turns nation against nation,
and snow into rivers of blood.
Since environmental activists successfully closed the
market on whitecoat fur in the mid-eighties (recall Greenpeace
ecowarriers spraypainted the whitecoats in dayglo colors to render their
pelts worthless to sealers who were clubbing the pups for their hides.),
the debate surrounding the continued hunting of harp seals off the
Canadian Maritimes has simmered. I have come to the Canadian Maritimes
as a journalist to try to understand the arguments surrounding this
extremely volatile issue. I have also come here as a naturalist and
human being to walk the line between my species and non-human animals.
In short, I came here to learn where I stand with regard to the way we
treat animals other than our own kind.
Over a period of two weeks I have talked with
sealers, fishermen, environmentalists, natives, non-natives, tourists,
politicians, and even members of the European Economic Union. So far, I
fail to see little more than a snarl of arguments offered by the
proponents on either side of the controversy.
Commercial hunting of harp seals in the North
Atlantic dates back to the early 19th century. Before formal laws
governed the taking of seals in international waters, hundreds of boats
carrying tens of thousands of sealers from Newfoundland, Nova Scotia,
and Norway arrived in the Gulf of St. Lawrence just as female seals
gathered on the pack ice to give birth and suckle their pups. Adult
seals were shot and the whitecoat pups were dragged away from their
mothers and bludgeoned with long wooden truncheons then immediately
skinned on the ice. Vast stretches of pack ice were soaked red as
upwards of 500,000 seals were slaughtered annually. Whitecoats, whose
fur formed the commercial basis of the hunt, constituted 90% of the
catch.
I went to the Magdalens with a good deal of
trepidation - which of us, having seen the images of sealers clubbing
whitecoats until the ice was stained scarlet and melted into the blood
of thousands of baby seals, wouldn't? Even if you hadn't seen the images
of the slaughter, one poster showing a close-up photo of a whitecoat -
that endearing whiskered visage with the ebony eyes - distributed during
the early eighties, combined with the caption informing you that sealers
clubbed these pups even as they suckled on their mothers' teats, and
then, in their hurry to get as many pelts as possible, sometimes skinned
them alive - was sufficiently heartrending to mobilize international
boycotts of seal fur products, and virtually shut down the global market
for whitecoat mittens, hats, and coats. The club-wielding fishermen were
seen as vile, heartless, "baby-killers". Querying a bartender
shortly after my arrival on the islands about whether he knew any
sealers who might be willing to talk with me about sealing, I
anticipated being taken to some seaside cave lit with oil lamps made
from seal skulls to interview a Marlon Brando type who, as he lounged in
a high-backed armchair covered with adult harp seal hides, and was
himself clothed in blood-stained whitecoat furs, munched on fried
flipper.
Most of the fishermen I talked with admitted that
only the old-timers still fry up a flipper now and again. "My
children don't even like the taste of seal meat." confessed one
sealer's wife. She was also the one who became very indignant when,
during one of our discussions, I referred to a seal pup as a baby.
"Only humans have babies!" she retorted.
Today, seal hunting continues in the Maritimes. Only
the commercial hunting of juvenile harp seals younger than two weeks
(the whitecoats) and hooded "blueback" seals was banned in
1987. Harp seals older than two weeks are still hunted for their fur.
Annual catches average around 50,000 seals. Still, John Efford, a member
of the Newfoundland House of Assembly with a taste for blood slushies
yearns for the days of the crimson tide. He proposes raising the seal
quota to 500,000 seals claiming that seals have devastated Atlantic cod
stocks and are responsible, in large part, for the moratorium imposed on
cod fishing in 1990. Science belies this politico's misguided agenda
and fingers the fishermen and overfishing, not the seals.
Maritime fishermen fish for cod, halibut, pollack,
mackerel, and lobster depending on the time of year. When in season,
they fish for seals. They regard seals as just another component of the
marine resource package. As one fisherman put it, "We are farmers
and seals are one of the crops we harvest from the sea." In fact,
Canada's Department of Fisheries and Oceans classifies the hunting of
seals as a "fishery". Meanwhile, environmentalists consider
seals to be sentient beings apart from clams and mackerel, and are
fighting to stop seal hunting altogether.
Adding insult upon injury, the Chinese are offering
sealers $50.00 per seal to hack the penises off 60,000 seals per year. A
small bone inside the penis (Several mammalian species including dogs,
some rodents, and seals have a bone in their penis to add rigidity
during copulation.) is used by the Chinese in aphrodisiac potions.
Recently, revenues from ecotourism have burgeoned.
According to an independent study commissioned by the International Fund
for Animal Welfare (I.F.A.W.), ecotourism brings about $400,000 to the
Magdalens annually while the potential income from seal hunting is about
$480,000, that is, provided all seal carcasses are sold. Actual profits
are much less, however, since there has been no market, and sealers
admit they often fail to offset the cost of hunting the animals. I.F.A.W.
believes that seal watching and seal killing are incompatible. Sealers
disagree. Yet, they prevent anyone without a seal-hunting license,
including journalists, from venturing anywhere near the hunting areas.
Moreover, ecotourists who come to see the seals each spring are furious
when they learn that the seals are still being hunted.
The pup stirs, rolls onto its back, and scratches its
belly with the claws at the end of its flipper, all without waking. It
remains on its back and sleeps with its flippers folded neatly along its
sides, its tiny black nose pointing at something in the milky sky. The
snow squall has passed, but it is still foggy. Through the fog, I hear
the engine of the chopper cough, sputter, and catch, and the whir of the
blades rising like a teakettle coming to boil. It is time to leave.
Gathering up my thoughts, I begin walking back toward
the chopper. At that moment, the mother shoots out of nearby hole like a
giant beach ball that had been held underwater and suddenly released.
With her clawed flippers, she pulls herself swiftly across the ice
toward her pup. On her mottled gray back, she bares her signature - the
distinctive black, harp-shaped marking for which these seals are named.
The pup, awakened by its mother's grunts and groans, whines, and crawls
over to meet her.
Face to face, they touch noses, sniffing,
recognizing, acknowledging one another. Then the female rolls over onto
her side as the pup sidles alongside her. It finds a convenient teat and
begins suckling. I walk by the two of them, within six feet of the
mother nursing her pup. As I pass, the female looks up and directly at
me, transfixing me in my tracks.
The slurping and sucking noises of the whitecoat
drawing hard on the juicy teat seemed to grow louder. Eventually, these
sounds were joined by other, similar sounds, as though my hearing had
improved ten fold and my ears could pick up every nursing pup drawing
desperately on its mother's teat from one end of the ice floe to the
other. Then, the voices of the adult seals swelled to a crescendo
drowning out all but the sounds of their nursing pups. I heard no
chopper; even the whistling of the relentless icy wind disappeared
completely. The nursing sounds floated on the crescendo of voices like a
children's choir accompanied by a symphony orchestra - it was one of
the most sublime moments of my life, like the day I first beheld the
Grand Canyon, or saw my first aurora borealis!
All the while, that female seal's eyes held mine
fast and I could no more turn away from her than I could avert my eyes
from the last gaze of a dying lover, or from something so beautiful
that, once you've beheld it, you cannot look away even though the
sight of it could blind or even kill you, like an eclipse or a volcanic
explosion.
I couldn't say how long I stood there. I had no
sense of time. I was not impelled to hurry back to the chopper, in fact,
I had lost all memory of how I had arrived on the ice floe. It seemed I
had been there for as long as the seals.
Satiated, the pup suddenly released the teat. White
rivulets ran down the dark gray coat of the adult from the abandoned
nipple. Fully awake and restless, the pup grumbled as though to demand
attention. As the female turned her head and began nuzzling the petulant
pup, I was overcome with the same feeling you get when you know that you've
overslept on a morning when you have to catch an early flight out of the
airport. Suddenly, the chopper's high-pitched whir was all I heard. By
the time I climbed on board, everyone else was already strapped into
their seats and nibbling on their box lunches.
Back at the hotel, after a long, hot shower, I lay
down on the bed and closed my eyes for a while before going to dinner.
There, as vivid in my mind as though I were back on the ice, was that
harp seal with her nursing pup. I held the female's limpid eyes until
the gray afternoon light guttered in the curtained window, until the
hotel restaurant closed, until I was sitting alongside the two of them
again watching and listening to that whitecoat pup suckling on its
mother's milk, until my ears were once again brimming with the voices of
seals.
