2023-07-22 04:35:00
A highly controversial activity, the seal hunt unleashes passions. Quebecers from the Magdalen Islands in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, however, dream of rehabilitating it, supported by fishermen who fear for fish stocks.
In this archipelago, hunting is possible almost all year round: in winter on the ice, in summer by boat.
Installed at the helm of his zodiac, Yoanis Menge, hunter and photographer, likes to remind us that this is an ancestral practice for the Madelinots, the inhabitants of the islands, but also for several Aboriginal peoples of Canada, including the Inuit.
Despite the wind and the rough ocean, his small troop set sail from Grosse-Ile, the northern tip of the archipelago, accompanied at the end of May by an AFP team. In front of the boat, a row of seals installed on a sandbank, takes the sun.
But at the slightest noise, they run off. Once in the water, reaching them becomes much more complex. Only their little black heads stick out.
It is finally on the beach that the hunters achieve their ends with the help of a rifle. A few minutes later, the animal is directly butchered on the spot.
“Here we live with the seal, we don’t just hunt it,” explains Yoanis Menge.
“What prompted the United States or Europe to ban seal products? These are sentimental reasons. It is the only animal boycotted for sentimental reasons”, adds the forties who spent years photographing hunters before becoming one in turn.
“Assassins”
Talking about the seal hunt in the Magdalen Islands often comes back to a shocking image. That of Brigitte Bardot who posed at the end of the 70s on the ice floe, alongside whitecoats, these young seals barely a few days old.
Activists were particularly opposed to the club technique, which consists of killing the animal by bludgeoning it to death.
“We were treated as savages, barbarians and murderers,” recalls Gil Thériault, director of the Association of Intra-Quebec Seal Hunters.
“These are insults that have done us a lot of harm. It was an attack directed against our way of life”, regrets the Madelinot.
Since then, the hunt for “sea wolves” as they are called here has continued to decline. On the Canadian east coast, there are grey, harp, harbor, bearded, hooded and ringed seals. But commercial hunting mainly concerns the first two groups.
During the 1950s and 1960s, white coat hunting dominated, their white coat being much sought after by the fashion industry. It was banned in 1987.
And little by little the doors will close for hunters: the United States has banned seal products since 1972.
And in 2010, the European Union imposed an embargo because of the hunting methods, considered too “cruel”, a blow for the industry which lost 30% of its customers.
Today, the animal is hunted mainly for its meat for local consumption and for some Quebec gourmet restaurants.
But some would like to make this meat better known, such as Réjean Vigneau, the island’s butcher, who makes around fifteen different products made from sea bass – sausages, terrines…
“It’s a local meat, without hormones, very rich in iron, lean, excellent for health”, explains the little man, who is one of a few dozen active hunters today, against several hundred a few decades ago.
“It’s surprising that it’s still frowned upon on the planet,” he adds.
– Fish stock at rock bottom-
A decline that hunters dream of reversing today, explaining that seals have few predators and that they now threaten fish stocks, the main resource of the Madelinots.
“In the Gulf, given the number of gray seals and their consumption of cod, plaice, or herring – we have a problem. The fish stocks are not going up”, denounces Ghislain Cyr, fisherman.
“Seal populations have increased exponentially since the 1970s,” confirms Simon Nadeau, marine mammal specialist for the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans. “But we’re not talking about overpopulation.”
The number of harp seals in the Northwest Atlantic nearly quadrupled between 1970 and 2019 to 7.6 million. And the population of gray seals has increased from 5,000 individuals in the Gulf of St. Lawrence to 44,000 in 2017.
Conversely, Canada’s groundfish stocks are at their lowest level on record.
But for Simon Nadeau, the two cannot be linked so easily, in particular because the entire ecosystem has been modified in recent decades due to global warming and overfishing.
“Seals may have contributed to the decline of fish, but they are not the cause of this decline,” he continues, while acknowledging that they are now, however, part of the factors that prevent certain stocks from recovering.
07/22/2023 04:33:29 – Grosse-Île (Canada) (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
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