Each year, the Humane Society of the United States sends team members to Canada to document that country’s still-legal “hunting” of baby seals on the ice.
HSUS team members brave bitterly cold, dangerous conditions, not to mention the constant threats from the fishermen who turn to butchering baby seals to supplement their income.
This year, the HSUS team made real progress in their efforts to end this gruesome and completely unnecessary slaughter. HSUS has asked people to sign on to a Canadian seafood boycott in the hopes of effecting the market enough that fishermen would abandon the seal “hunt".
Over 600,000 individuals and over 5,000 businesses have pledged to not purchase Canadian seafood until Canada bans the seal “hunt”. The fishing industry is losing money, and prices for seal skins have crashed to $15 (CAD) -- an 86 percent drop from 2006.
Most fishermen aren't bothering to leave home to join the hunt, and tens of thousands of seals have been spared. Also, for the first time in history, Canadians had introduced a bill that would ban the seal slaughter entirely, largely backed by the efforts of HSUS.
Russia has agreed to a ban of killing harp seals less than a year old, effectively ending their “hunt” as the furs of older seals are not a desired commodity. In fact, Yuriy Trutnev, Russia's Minister of Natural Resources and Ecology, called the seal slaughter "bloody," and remarked that the killing of defenseless animals can't be deemed a "hunt."
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