The Canadian seal hunt is the largest commercial slaughter of marine mammals on the planet. This was true even before the Canadian government announced that it would allow fishermen to kill 975,000 harp seals off Newfoundland and Labrador between 2003 and 2006. Despite scientific evidence that such a high quota is unsustainable, the government claims the hunt will not harm seal populations. To make matters worse, it's doubtful that the Canadian government will even enforce the quota should sealers exceed it. After all, officials have turned a blind eye when sealers have exceeded quotas in the past.

The hunt targets very young seals. The Canadian government's own figures show that 96.6% of the reported 286,238 seals killed during the 2002–2003 hunt were between 12 days to 12 weeks old. These seals were most likely beaten to death with a club or a large ice-pick-like hakapik. Later in the season, hunters use rifles.

An alarming number of the seals are skinned while alive and responsive to pain. Recently, an independent, international team of veterinarians observed the hunt and examined the corpses of skinned seals. They found evidence that up to 40% of them had skull injuries that were not sufficient to have caused death.

See The HSUS Animal Channel's slide show on the seal hunt.

Many Canadians—as well as citizens of other nations—are appalled by the brutality and unsustainability of this pointless hunt. And they don't believe the claims by the Canadian government that the hunt is necessary to protect the region's crashing fish populations, which have been devastated by many years of industrial fishing. These people want the Canadian government to stop not only promoting the hunt, but also helping out the seal fur, meat, and oil industries.

The 2003–2004 hunt was met with massive protest. It wasn't only the number of seals killed—the current, incomplete, count is 321,199—but also the rampant brutality exhibited even while sealers knew observers were both watching and videotaping. The video footage and still photographs were seen around the world, hardening opposition to the hunt. Politicians in the United States, the United Kingdom, and other nations have joined citizens in pressuring Canada to do the decent thing and end this barbaric and wasteful hunt.

In an effort to convince the Canadian government to end the seal hunt, The HSUS and other members of the Protect Seals network are calling on consumers to boycott Canadian seafood products such as snow crab as soon as the first baby seal is killed in March 2005. To make the boycott easy for consumers, we've created a downloadable pocket guide.