Ugliness of fashion: Sealskin is 'in' again
East Coast hunt kill is up to numbers unheard of for half a century

Daphne Bramham
Vancouver Sun

January 8, 2005

My grandmother had a seal coat that was as silky and sensuous as anything I've ever touched or imagined.

It was always a mystery that my quite unhuggable grandmother would have chosen a coat that was so tempting to snuggle up against. But such was its lure that I was compelled to stroke it ever so often and ever so softly so that she wouldn't notice.

She loved that coat. Smartly dressed was the way she would have described herself in the harsh blasts of the Prairie winters.

I loved that coat, too -- until much later when I realized that baby seals had been clubbed over the head, bludgeoned to death to make it.

My grandmother's mink-trimmed seal coat and matching hat came rushing back to me this week with the National Post's proclamation that "sleek seal is fashion's 'in' skin." It practically made me ill.

"One of the things we've noticed is how slimming a seal jacket can be," Bernie Halloran of Vogue Furriers in St. John's, Nfld., told the Post. "It doesn't make you look big. And if you're someone who is plus-sized, they like it because it really doesn't make them look big."

It is especially slimming to seals.

Halloran went on to suggest that the attraction to the rich and inhumane is the snob appeal of having something so rare. What the Post and Halloran neglected to mention is that sleek sealskin is rare because so many countries have banned its import due to the inhumanity of bludgeoning seals to death for fashion.

(Inuit clubbing seals to death for food is also repugnant, but is slightly more understandable.)

The United States banned seal products in 1972. The European Union banned the import of harp and hooded seal products in 1983.

So, if sealskin isn't allowed in fashion capitals like Milan, Paris, London and New York City, among the few "in" places for seal sales are Russia and China, where animal rights are even less of a priority than human rights.

What's disturbing is despite overwhelming public sentiment at home and abroad against the seal slaughter, the Canadian government hasn't stopped thinking big.

It upped the kill quotas in 2003 to 975,000 over three years out of a population estimated at five million. The 2004 kill was the largest since 1956, with 350,000 seals bludgeoned, shot and stripped of their skins. It amounted to the equivalent of about 10,000 seals killed in each daylight hour during the spring hunt off the coast of Newfoundland.

That was up 80,000 from the previous year and nearly 100,000 from years before that.

In raising the quota, Ottawa proclaimed it was banning the killing of baby seals. It didn't. What it banned was the killing of white-coated seals.

But baby seals are only white for about 12 days. So it's perfectly okay to chase down 13-day-old seals and whack them to death, but it's illegal to skin them alive.

Yet the International Fund for Animal Welfare contends that about 95 per cent of the seals killed are less than a year old and 42 per cent are skinned alive.

The Humane Society of the United States described the 2004 hunt as "the largest kill of marine mammals on Earth," adding "that a First World government would allow it is reprehensible."

Most Canadians likely would find it reprehensible as well, if they knew about it. But because of limited media coverage, one study found that 60 per cent are blissfully unaware that the seal hunt still exists. Fewer are likely aware that seals are being killed in numbers unheard of in 50 years or that a new hunt begins this month off Nova Scotia's coast.

The same is not true in other parts of the world. Big American media, including the New York Times and CNN, and virtually every British newspaper from the Independent to the Daily Mail gave prominent, negative coverage to last spring's hunt off Newfoundland.

Not that it fazed Newfoundland sealers and their supporters. In fact, they're no doubt already pressuring Ottawa to renew or even up the quotas for 2006 and beyond, especially following the recent jump in sealskin prices to $70.80 a pelt, up from $45 in 2003 and $15 in the mid-1990s.

Tina Fagan, executive director of the Canadian Sealers Association, even taunted celebrity animal activists. "Who needs to worry about Paris Hilton?" she sneered after Hilton modelled a t-shirt with the slogan "Club Sandwiches not Seals."

They should worry about the video clips on the IFAW's website (www.ifaw.org) and PETA's website (www.peta.org). Somebody should also slip them a copy of PETA's most recent Animal Times magazine. Charlize Theron and her dog on the cover with the quote: "If you wouldn't wear your dog . . . please don't wear any fur."

If the Oscar-winning actress were photographed on the ice floes off Nova Scotia hugging liquid-eyed baby seals this month, it might blast sealers and federal politicians out of the 19th century and -- if not into the new millennium -- at least to the 1970s when French actress Brigitte Bardot first focused the international spotlight on Canadian ice floes.

It would no doubt shock Canadians back into action because most -- even meat-eaters -- care about humane treatment of animals.

Many Canadians don't think it's okay for laying hens to spend a lifetime jammed eight to a cage. They don't think it's okay for them to be forced to moult to promote egg production. They don't think it's okay that their beaks are hacked off without anesthesia.

Just ask the folks at McDonalds, KFC or Burger King who were forced by consumer pressure and boycotts to ensure that chickens are more humanely kept and killed.

And let's be clear, chickens are much less winsome and appealing than baby seals.

The sealers, of course, will argue that seals have helped destroy the cod-fishing industry. Let them prove that it wasn't commercial over-fishing.

They and their government will cry poor.

But Canadians should resoundingly tell Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Danny Williams to sign the offshore oil revenue deal being offered by Ottawa.

The deal that Williams has defiantly rejected and protested by taking down Canadian flags would turn Newfoundland into a have province and give it the resources needed to modernize its economy.

Clubbing baby seals is barbaric. And I'm certain if my grandmother were alive, she would not wear their sleek skins on her back. She'd be smartly dressed in faux leopard.