Warring over seals

By Aaron Beswick

FOR THE SOU’WESTER

Belgium and Holland have banned the importation of seal products. Germany, Italy and Austria have drafted similar legislation and there are calls for bans in France, Britain and Spain.

Newfoundland Fisheries Minister Tom Rideout is accusing Canada’s fisheries ambassador Loyola Sullivan of being “defeatist.” A British Columbia Liberal MP has called on Canada to end the hunt.

Is the battle lost?

“This year will tell the tale,” said Francis Patey, a veteran of the previous battle to save the hunt. “The seal hunt might continue, but it might stop being lucrative enough for many to bother.”

Patey’s book, A Battle Lost, tells of the media frenzy and showdowns between sealers, Greenpeace activists, anti-hunt American congressman Leo Ryan and various celebrities.

Sitting in his living room and looking for similarities between present and past, Patey fingers through the pages of his scrapbook. Each page holds local and international media reports, hate letters received by sealers, correspondence and comics by groups like Cod Peace. His scrapbook is a portal to the late 1970s, when St. Anthony would seem the centre of the world for a few days each winter and spring.

“Those were wild times,” remembered Patey.

On a cold morning in 1977, Patey waited with other pro-sealers at St. Anthony’s airport wearing pins declaring ‘Save our Swilers’. French film star Brigitte Bardot’s plane soon landed, she stepped off and gladly put on a pin.

“She thought swilers were seals, until someone told her and she took it off – we had a good laugh.”

What had begun as the St. Anthony Citizens’ Committee had evolved into a province-wide pro-sealing lobby-group known as the Progressive Rights Organization.

There were more lessons than victories.

“Where we made a mistake, the same one often made today, was falling into the hands of the international media by talking to them at all,” said Patey. “Most people weren’t media savvy – their words would be misused and their names would be spread around the world.”

He then turns the heavy pages of his scrapbook to hate mail received by sealers in which they were accused of being “blood thirsty murders.” Other letters wished eternal impotence upon them. Some of the letters were later copied by South African researchers studying hate literature in an attempt to understand the black/white divide in their apartheid stricken country.

Hate literature and telephone threats continues to plague sealers and their families. While worrying about her husband on the ice floes during the 2005 hunt, Anchor Point’s Bertha Genge was inundated with phone calls.

“They called Ren, my husband, a murderer and a woman beater,” Bertha Genge told the Northern Pen newspaper at the time. “It was probably the hardest night I’ve punched yet and there were a good many nights I tossed and turned worrying about my husband and the crew getting back to the ship safely when they were out at the seals.”

Further calls contained threats but no names, including one person who said, “I’m coming for you and I’m coming for you now.” The origins of the calls were never discovered and charges were never laid.

While some things, like threatening calls, persist from the late 1970s, much has changed.

“It’s different now – back then it was almost physical, now it’s a war of words,” said Patey. “They can sit at their computers in their homes now and e-mail off press releases. You might see the odd helicopter, but other than that you don’t see them anymore.”

A far cry from that fateful night in 1977 when St. Anthony, N.L. was bursting with some 500 journalists, protestors and sealers.

“Things seemed ready to explode – everybody was drinking,” remembered Patey. “The clergy went to the RCMP and asked that they cut off liquor sales.”

The town didn’t explode and the next morning some 50 sealers and their supporters lay down in front of the Viking Motel, daring Greenpeace activist Brian Davies to walk over them to get to his helicopters. Davies refused the offer and the sealers were hauled away one by one by the RCMP.

“That’s when I knew we had lost.”

The whitecoat hunt in Canada was soon banned and the seal hunt died down for many years. Recently the seal hunt has become big business in a fishery still reeling after the cod moratorium. Fishermen afflicted by high gas prices and low product prices have turned to the harvest of older seals.

Consequently, the anti-sealing forces have returned and the battle has begun anew.





(Aaron Beswick is a journalist with Transcontinental Media’s Northern Pen newspaper and a contributor to the Sou’Wester.)