The market for Canadian seal pelts has gone dry but the federal government will still allow sealers to kill 400,000 of the marine mammals when the annual hunt opens next Monday.
The quota, announced in a release issued by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans on Tuesday, ignores the advice of one of the government’s own scientists who urged that fewer harp seals be taken this year because of waning sea ice.
Russia and two of its neighbours have informed the World Trade Organization that they are banning the import and export of harp seal pelts – a move that animal-rights activists are celebrating as the death knell of Canada’s commercial seal industry.
Russia has been the biggest market for the Canadian seal fur industry. And harp seals are the prime source of that fur.
Dr. Philippe Pibarot has been studying seal heart valves to see if they might be a better transplant option for humans than those from cows or pigs, believing they may be more durable than the other animal tissue.
The research at Laval University is still in the earliest stages. Pibarot has yet to begin collecting data through testing rodents and he says that a clinical trial in humans is hypothetical at this point - at least a decade of positive results and funding would have to be established first.
Despite that, a Quebec-based seal fur company has begun championing Pibarot's hypothesis, seeing the research as a buoy for Canada's beleaguered seal harvest.
"Each year, up to 85,000 seals are killed in Namibia to make just a few dollars from their furs, when they would be worth so much more to the Namibian economy alive," said Claire Bass, WSPA International Oceans Campaign Leader. "Eco-tourism is a growing part of Namibia's identity, but tourists will be shocked to learn that a seal they photograph one day may be clubbed to death the next morning. There is a clear economic case for the government to protect these animals."
