Icy Battleground: Canada, the International Fund for Animal Welfare, and the Seal Hunt

Janet Arnett is the former campus manager of adult education at Ontario’s Georgian College. She is the author of Antiques and Collectibles: Starting Small, The Grange at Knock, and 673 Ways to Save Money.

The war over Canada’s seal hunt has been ongoing for over 40 years.
The pro side consists mainly of a small group of Newfoundland outport
fishers who hunt seals for a few weeks each spring, and their champions,
the Newfoundland and Canadian (federal) governments. On the other side
of the battle is the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) and
numerous other animal protection and environmental action groups. Other
players include Aboriginal groups, humane societies, Greenpeace, the
European Union, American fast-food restaurants, U.K. retailers, even
B.C. salmon fishermen. It takes two pages to list the acronyms of the
many groups joining in the fray.

The pro side promotes economic benefits of the hunt and the alleged
need to limit the seal herd size in order to protect the cod and capelin
fisheries. IFAW and its allies base their position on charges that the
hunt is inhumane, cruel, and threatens a shrinking seal population. They
also dispute the morality of the hunt, questioning the right of humans
to killing wild animals for the luxury fur market.

Barry’s work is a blow-by-blow account of who did what to whom in
this four-decade-old battle. He draws on a wide range of print resources
to chronicle each engagement in the war—the ads and articles, boycotts
and sanctions, protests, speeches in Parliament, committee meetings,
quotas, observation teams, herd population counts, concessions and
rollback of cut-backs, even a Royal Commission. Yet the war continues.

The history of the controversy is well documented with citations and
sources following each chapter. The detail is impressive, although it
makes for rather slow reading. Both sides’ position and actions are
presented, with the government’s stance portrayed as a “reasoned
approach” and the IFAW’s campaign described as “emotionally
charged and obsessive.” The only visuals are a few ads, postcards, and
a letter produced by IFAW. The book is a useful summary of a uniquely
Canadian conflict of cultures.