Canada's annual seal hunt off to slow start

Yahoo News 28 Mar 10;

MONTREAL (AFP) – Canada's annual seal hunt was off to a slow start Sunday, with most fishing boats still moored in their harbors, as missing ice floes in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence kept their prey hundreds of miles to the north.

"I know one boat set sail tonight, at around 4:00 am in the morning," Magdalen Island seal hunters' association president Denis Longuepee told AFP.

"In past years, there were 10 to 40 boats weighing anchor" to go seal hunting, he added.

About a dozen hunters are aboard a ship trying to find a small harem of 1,000 seals spotted Saturday from a plane by Fisheries and Oceans Canada near Blanc-Sablon, in the northeastern corner of Quebec province, according to Radio Canada.

The mild winter this year has hampered the hunt for the Greenland seal. A lack of ice floes in the Gulf of Saint Lawrence has kept some 300,000 seals far to the north, off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador, where there is coastal ice.

That's good news for seal hunters in Newfoundland and Labrador, said Longuepee.

Seal hunting brings in 20-30 percent of the yearly revenue of 400-500 hunter-fishermen in Magdalen Islands. The rest of the year, they fish for lobster and clams.

Seal hunting is highly controversial for its perceived inhumane killing methods. The 27 European Union states in July 2009 adopted a ban on seal products, ruling the goods could not be marketed from 2010.

Around 6,000 Canadians take part in seal hunting each year along the Atlantic coast, and 25 percent of their sales had come from exporting products to Europe.

Canada and Greenland account for more than 50 percent of the 900,000 seals slain in the world each year. Other seal-hunting countries include Norway, Namibia, Iceland, Russia and the United States.