David Amess

Conservative Party | Southend West

Seal hunting

This speech was part of a debate in Westminster Hall.

I am delighted to have the opportunity to raise a very important issue, which has been somewhat forgotten in recent years. That is not for want of trying by people such as Brigitte Bardot to bring it to other people's attention. I e-mailed her office to tell her that this debate would be taking place, but I am not sure whether she will be joining us. It was Brigitte Bardot who, many years ago, first brought this issue to the attention of the general public. She went out to Canada and posed with some seals to demonstrate in graphic detail exactly what goes on.

There are some who would say, "For goodness sake, why waste Parliament's time discussing animal welfare matters?" However, like many colleagues on both sides of the House, I feel strongly about animal welfare issues. We feel that a civilisation is judged in certain respects by how it treats animals. None of us can get inside an animal to understand it. Are animals less intelligent than women and men? Are they more intelligent? None of us knows. But Parliament should spend at least some of its time discussing animal welfare issues.

I will certainly not use the debate as an opportunity for me to have a go at the Government. I am using the procedure in the hope that the Minister can send some sort of message to our Canadian friends. I pay tribute to an organisation called Respect for Animals. It is not perhaps widely known. It is run by four individuals and depends on the general public to sustain it financially. It runs campaigns sensibly and constructively and is entirely responsible for bringing this issue to the attention of myself and other hon. Members. As a result, an early-day motion has been tabled on our concerns about the slaughter of seals.

Together with two other Members I had a meeting on 11 September with the Canadian high commissioner. Canada is one of our greatest allies. Our meeting was conducted in a warm atmosphere. The high commissioner brought with him a number of his colleagues and officials who had great expertise in this area. It was time well spent. Although I will go into greater detail, the bottom line for me and the other 159 signatories to the early-day motion is that baby seals, lying on the ice, are not entirely delighted when a human being comes along and clubs them on the head.

I understand the historical reasons for the pursuit of seals and I understand all the arguments that the Canadian Government advance. I said at the end of the meeting that I had not been convinced that killing the baby seals was anything other than cruel.

Early-day motion 135, tabled by the hon. Member for Broxtowe (Dr. Palmer), called upon the Government to take action over the seal hunt, and has been signed by about 160 Members of all parties. The hon. Members for Lewes (Mr. Baker) and for Brighton, Pavilion (Mr. Lepper) and I saw the Canadian high commissioner, His Excellency Mel Cappe, to raise the concerns detailed in the early-day motion.

I do not want to be too emotional, but the Canadian Government have effectively declared war on seals. Last winter they announced that they would allow nearly 1 million harp and hooded seals to be killed during the next three years. That is a huge number. In 2003, according to figures from the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans, some 289,512 harp seals, 151 hooded seals and 1,870 seals of four other species were killed; those are horrifying statistics. I hope that the House will accept that they do not include the many seals that are shot in the water and die later but are never retrieved.

I am delighted that this debate is being held today, as the 2003–04 seal hunt officially opens in 11 days' time on 15 November, and last for six months. However, most of the seals will be killed in March next year, so there is time to take action. I shall later describe precisely what happens to the seals, as it is right that the House should know. They are usually clubbed to death, and the vast majority are killed when they are less than three months old.

An independent veterinary survey established in 2001 by the International Fund for Animal Welfare included a number of eminent vets: Joanne Fielder, John Gripper and Ian Robinson from the United Kingdom, Rosemary Burden from the United States of America, Alan Longair from Canada, and Debbie Ruehlmann, a neurologist specialist from the United States. They showed that 42 per cent. of the seals observed were skinned while they were still alive and conscious. That is unbelievable in this day and age.

Stephen Harris, professor of environmental science at the university of Bristol, witnessed the hunt in 2002 and described in an excellent article - I am prepared to believe him, because obviously it suits me to do so - the complete indifference to cruelty of some of the sealers. He found that the hunt suffered from a lack of monitoring. The Canadian high commissioner reassured my parliamentary colleagues and I that monitoring took place, but Stephen Harris believes that there was a lack of monitoring, unacceptable cruelty and definitely the potential for over-exploitation.

Most of us, including the general public, think that the clubbing of baby seals no longer goes on, but it does. A million have been killed over three years, and it is an important issue - I shall not be sidetracked by hunting with hounds - as the level of killing is almost twice as bad as it was during the late 1970s and early 1980s, when Brigitte Bardot first brought it to the attention of the world.

As a result of public pressure and political will, the European Union banned the import of products from whitecoats, which are harp seals up to their first moult and approximately 10 days old, and from bluebacks, which are hooded seals up to their first moult and approximately 18 months old. That was wonderful, and all animal welfare groups welcomed it. However, although it had the effect of stopping or at least severely curtailing the hunt for a few years, it has since continued. Those products are now exported to countries in the EU.

The Canadian Government have worked hard to find a way round the ban, and even subsidise the hunt. Thanks to a marketing effort, the skins from slightly older seals - in the case of harp seals, they are literally a few days older - are now being imported into the EU. That circumvents Council directive 83/129/EEC of 28 March 1983, which relates to the importation into member states of skins of certain seal pups and products derived therefrom, and which is aimed at stopping this cruel slaughter. The innocent seal is being used as a scapegoat by the Canadian Department for Fisheries and Oceans, which is the very Department that oversaw the collapse through over-fishing of fish populations, including cod, in Canadian waters.

The Department also created the myth that seals are to blame for the demise in fish stocks, which is just not true. Harp seals spend most of their lives in the north Atlantic, where they eat a variety of species including arctic cod, a species that itself eats cod. If anything, seals maintain cod populations. The ecosystem is much more complicated than the Department for Fisheries and Oceans suggests, and if seals were not around other species would increase in number to fill the niche that had been created.

Seals and fish have been around for tens of millions of years. It is only human over-fishing, which the Department for Fisheries and Oceans has overseen, that has caused the problem of depleting fish stocks. Seal hunting is not the answer for restoring fish stocks, as the Canadians would have us believe. The answer is effective policing of fishermen and their respective catches, and the implementation of fishing quotas in Canada's waters.

Opinion poll research commissioned by the Canadian Government showed that 71 per cent. of Canadians are not familiar with the issues surrounding the seal hunt, and a majority of 54 per cent. of Canadians oppose the seal hunt. So why does it continue?

Last year, 46,463 raw and tanned seal skins were imported into the EU directly from Canada, and they were valued at euro1,545,000 - my primary source for that is EUROSTAT. Furthermore, the EU imports large numbers of skins of Canadian origin from Norway. The Minister might already be aware that the animal welfare organisation, Respect for Animals, has initiated a boycott of Canadian tourism - as many of us know, Canada is a wonderful and beautiful country to visit. The organisation will continue the boycott while the hunt continues, which concerns the Canadian high commissioner, and that type of protest is likely to increase.

Perhaps the Minister could remind the Canadian Government that tourism is worth far more to Canada than the seal hunt could ever be, and that the Government's reputation is being damaged by this bloody slaughter. I urge the Minster to persuade his European counterparts to consider extending the European regulations that were brought into force in 1983 to all seal products. Considering that the EU is the main importer of seal products, the Canadian Government might become resigned to the fact that the seal hunt, even when subsidised, is not worth continuing.

Danny Penman, a journalist, went to watch the slaughter of seals this March. He said he met his first Canadian harp seal, and added:

"At first she was frightened but curiosity soon got the better of her.

Within five minutes she was padding slowly across the ice. Moments later she was trying to snuggle up to me. The next day, she was almost certainly dead.

Canadian sealers landed on her ice sheet shortly after dawn. They then proceeded to batter, kill and skin every living thing. Within half an hour the ice and snow was drenched with blood."

This is not an emotive opportunity to exaggerate; that actually happened. The journalist said:

"We watched in horror as a man we called 'Conan the Barbarian' slaughtered everything that came within range.

In the space of thirty seconds he clubbed five baby seals. The first four were hit over the head with his hakaapik. The fifth was stroked on the head before being bolted with the club. He then flipped the seal over on her back and began to slice open her throat and stomach.

She then began to scream" -

so would we if we were treated like that -

"and wriggle furiously as Conan peeled off her skin. Within thirty seconds the baby seal's carcass was cooling on the ice, eyes staring blankly at the sky. Her skin was dragged across the ice and dumped on a pile of steaming pelts. Conan was a few dollars richer."

Later, the mother of that seal and others came on to the ice to look for it.

That cannot be allowed to continue, and I hope that the Minister agrees.