Slaughter and Survival on the Ice

A Canadian hunter raises a hakapik to the sky, prepared to club a young seal to death. Credit: Stewart Cook via Getty Images

By Ren Lashley

Content advisory: the following article contains graphic descriptions and images of animal cruelty. 

It is April 8, 2022, the first day of the Canadian seal hunt, and the ice teems with death. Hundreds of men scatter along the snowbanks with weapons in hand. Most sport identical synthetic snowsuits in shades of orange, green, or black – a stark contrast against the vast plain of piercing white snow. As they roam the landscape, trails of sloppy red boot prints mark their progress. Pools of blood soak the previously pristine landscape, infant bodies lining the icy coast. In the corner of this bloody tableau, a lone pup makes a break for it. Its black eyes frantically scan the surroundings, desperately pulling its small body away from the slaughter. Isolated on the ice, the pup, separated from its herd, screams out in fear for its mother. The man hoists a hakapik above his head, hammer side down. With one clean motion, he slams the wooden hammer down onto the pup’s skull, its cry dying in its throat. But the pup still breathes. He brings down the hammer again. And again. And again, until blood streams across the frozen wasteland, the pup’s skull crushed. Despite the damage, the pelt itself is free from punctures – a bullet would be a quicker death, but a hole in the skin won’t do. The man drags the lifeless corpse to the pile with the rest of the slaughtered, tossing the remains before moving on in search of more victims.  

On a separate snowy plain, still within the upper Canadian borders, a different style of seal hunt takes place. A few pairs of Inuit hunters approach the ice drifts on snowmobiles, thick hoods ruffling in the icy wind. Their jackets, made from the very creature they are hunting, are a deep brownish-grey, distinct from the white landscape. They slow their speed as they near the typical hunting grounds they frequent, scanning the ground for an aglu, a breathing hole in the ice made by seals. After looking into a few holes, they spot one without the thin layer of ice that indicates it has not been used. They park their snowmobiles a few meters away, approaching the hole on foot. Then they settle downwind, making sure not to cast a shadow into the hole, and wait. Inuit seal hunting involves a lot of waiting – waiting for weather to clear, waiting for seals to arrive, waiting for the right time of day.  

After anywhere from minutes to hours, the easily identifiable sound of a seal breaching rings out. The hunter quickly grabs his rifle and shoots a single shot into the hole, killing the seal. Without wasting time, he hooks the seal with a gaff hook, preventing it from sinking back into the sea, and begins to widen the aglu to get the body out. After the body is freed, the hunter moves it several meters from the hole to avoid offending the other seals. Upon hearing the shot, the other hunters converge on the aglu to help with the skinning process. The first man who arrives brews tea for the ones to follow, a communal practice to allow the hunters to warm up and unite over the kill. They skin the seal, washing the fat skin in the aglu as they share tea and a small part of the kill, consuming the meat raw. The successful hunter covers the meat on a sled attached to the back of the snowmobile, allowing the skin to drag behind to free it of more fat. The others return to their posts, waiting once more for the catch they need to feed their families. 

Inuit hunters have many uses for seals beyond just their meat. The blubber, when melted down into oil, is a vital source of fuel that keeps lanterns lit and stoves burning. The skin, when cut into strips, is incredibly versatile: It can be used as bowstrings, harpoon/towing lines, bootlaces, ties for tightening clothing/bags, thongs for lashing sleds, and even boot soles. When kept whole, the entire skin can be used as tents or covers for kayaks and umiaqs, open skin boats used by the Inuit. The most important role of seal skin is to create jackets, gloves, socks, boots, and other clothing to keep Inuit warm. Without access to seal skin, one of the only renewable resources in the Arctic, the Inuit would have been frozen out of the Arctic ages ago. 

Both of these hunts occur annually, in March or April (right after the breeding season), when the Canadian seal hunt officially begins. Hundreds of companies flood the ice in search of baby seals for one reason: their fur. When young, certain species of seals possess nearly solid white coats that slowly turn gray as they age. These pelts are a hot commodity for commercial hunters, as many seek out these furs for use in coats, hats, mittens, boots, and a variety of other garments. While the killing of white coat baby seals is illegal, it becomes legal when they start to shed their coats at about 12 days old. A majority of these hunters are Canadian fishermen looking to earn some cash during the off-season. Commercial fishermen make about one-twentieth of their incomes from seal hunting. Most sealers live in Newfoundland, where income from the hunt accounts for less than 1% of the province’s economy. With the meager income provided by these killings, it’s a wonder the commercial sealing industry still exists at all. 

The two sides of the seal hunt, commercial and traditional, are vastly different in both their goals and methods, yet fit within the same overall system. Both hunters face the Arctic cold in search of seals to hunt, fighting to survive in climates people rarely seek out willingly. Despite the long cultural history and traditions associated with the seal hunt, the Inuit are trapped within the same economic structure as the Canadian fishermen. The Inuit, however, are disadvantaged due to a long, complicated history of colonialism that has left them destitute. This muddies the waters of the issue, as those who seek to ban the seal hunt would save the lives of the seals while leaving the Inuit without their cultural traditions. These bans threaten not only cultural practices, but seal hunts that are vital for the livelihood of the Inuit.  

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A harp seal pup and adult, boasting vastly different coats. Credit: Gunnar Sætra via Institute of Marine Research

Archeological evidence reveals that seals have been hunted in the Canadian Arctic for over 4,000 years. Inuit began hunting seals due to a warm period from 900 to 1350 AD, which allowed “herds of harp seals, and, perhaps, walrus to extend their summer ranges into waters that had been closed for a thousand years. In turn, [Inuit culture] was able to expand eastward, hunting these animals along the northern coast and islands of Canada.” The subsequent arrival of European colonizers led to trade between the Inuit and the settlers. After the whaling industry began to decline in the 1870s, the seal took its place as the dominant trading product. The Inuit would trade sealskin, blubber, and sealskin boots to foreign hunters and trappers, forging ahead in the confusing new economy they found themselves in. They began to rely on the seal as the primary source of income, sticking to their cultural roots while also entering into the global marketplace.  

Many today question the spiritual relationship between the Inuit and the seal. Some believe that “the use of modern equipment to hunt seals and the selling of their skins for any reason are incompatible with presumed tenets of Inuit spirituality.” Yet, their history with the seal has spun a cultural web of survival for the Inuit and has always played an important role in their beliefs. The Inuit believe that the relationships between humans and animals are beyond the typical predator-prey dynamic – the animal can consciously decide to show itself to the hunter. The animal decides if a hunter has a worthy enough intent to make the kill, only showing itself if the hunter maintains Inummariit –– being a genuine, real person not just in their relationship to other people, but also to the creatures they hunt. They see animals and people in a constant dialogue, reacting to the intent of the other, which “brings them together into a single cognitive community.” The Inuit use every part of the seal as a sign of respect, to make sure that the sacrifice of life is not taken for granted. What parts of the seal they don’t use, they sell, fueling Inuit economies and providing their people with a fairly reliable source of income they would not find elsewhere.  

However, the industrialization of seal hunting has made the sale of seal products difficult for Inuit communities. Public outcry against seal clubbing, done almost exclusively by commercial hunters, made the practice taboo. In 1976, the international environmental organization Greenpeace began a campaign against seal hunting, broadly condemning the practice by using emotional language and violent, evocative imagery. It depicted the more violent actions done by these hunters, focusing primarily on seal clubbing. The public loudly voiced its distaste for the practice, refusing to buy products made from seals in protest. Although only 3% of seal clubbing in southern Canada is attributable to the Inuit people, they faced considerable backlash alongside the industrial hunters. This led to the Council of Ministers of the European Economic Community banning the import of seal pup skin for two years. In 1987, commercial hunting for 6-to-12-day-old harp seal pups was officially stopped in Canada, further tanking the market and leaving Indigenous populations destitute. Indigenous products made with seal skin did not use pup fur, as the Inuit exclusively hunt grown seals. They have no use for the white pelts the commercial hunters sell.  

The ban led to Inuit communities losing nearly 60% of their already meager income. Without the financial boost seal hunting offers, Inuit hunters struggled to afford fuel and ammunition. Commercial seal hunting bans have exceptions for Indigenous communities, but they make so little money due to the wide condemnation of their products that they can barely afford to hunt for their families, let alone for profit. The documentary Angry Inuk reports that the ban led to seal skin prices falling from around $100 to about $10, in turn causing average incomes of Inuit seal hunters in Nunavut to drop from $53,000 to $1,000. As income plummeted, suicide rates skyrocketed. One study found that “between 1999 and 2003, the rates in Inuit regions averaged 135 per 100,000, more than 10 times higher than the general Canadian rates.” 

Given the high poverty rates and their isolated location, a majority of Inuit have little to no access to affordable foods. One study on Canadian Inuit communities found 68.8% of Inuit lived in a household experiencing food insecurity. Seal meat can supplement the poor-quality food sold by supermarkets due to its high nutritional content. When compared with other meats like beef, pork, and chicken, seal has not only the highest ratio of iron, calcium, magnesium, and vitamin B12 but also the most protein. Seal meat is incredibly lean, with less than 2% total fat compared to beef’s 23%, which can help decrease the rate of heart disease. Consuming traditional seal-based foods also helps connect the Inuit to their culture as “It is niqituinnaq, real Inuit food, that conceptually and concretely integrates the human community through harvesting with the natural environment.” The seal hunting ban, while beneficial to the seals themselves, destroyed Inuit livelihoods and made it difficult for them to connect to their culture through the stigma surrounding their cultural foods. Without the seal hunt, Inuit communities struggled to survive and continue to do so to this day. 

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An Inuit family regroups after catching a seal. Credit: Peter Prokosch

However, the Inuit refuse to let their practices be dismissed without a fight. Documentarian Alethea Arnaquq-Baril and her 2016 film Angry Inuk are raising awareness of the effects of the seal hunting ban. Her documentary counters much of the dominant narrative on seal hunting, such as the myth that harp seals are endangered and that the governmental exceptions on Indigenous seal hunting are the only thing required to repair this damaged community. The film presents the lives of the Inuit to a primarily Western audience, showing the vitality of this practice, and follows Inuit lawyer and seal skin clothing designer Aaju Peter as she travels with Inuit students to Europe to counter-protest against animal rights groups like the International Fund for Animal Welfare. However, Inuit protesters struggle against the larger organizations with much better funding and were ultimately unable to stop a 2009 vote to ban all seal products. A few animal rights organizations have issued statements that they are not against the subsistence farming that the Inuit practice, but it has been too little too late.  

In addition to the documentary, a more recent trend known as “sealfies” has been raising controversy amongst animal rights activists. After the 2014 Oscars, television personality Ellen DeGeneres held a selfie-focused anti-sealing charity event that raised $3 million to petition the Canadian government to further restrict seal hunting. As a response, some Inuit began to post their own “sealfies” of themselves wearing products made from seals or consuming seal meat, some even posting pictures of themselves next to dead seals. The founder of the campaign, mask dancer and poet Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory, said that she “wanted to it to be a tongue-in-cheek protest to all these very serious animal rights activists. Many … Inuit use humor to make a strong point instead of anger.” Williamson Bathory “also wanted the sealfie to focus on cultural celebration and positive self-esteem” to detract from the negative lens through which many people view seal hunting. This movement took Twitter and other social media platforms by storm, drumming up support for the traditional Inuit way of life. By publicizing their experience and the important role seal products play in their culture, Inuit activists are reclaiming their narrative, centering their culture as important and deserving of respect as any other culture. 

At first glance, seal hunting seems barbaric. It’s an easy target – “Seal hunting is done out on the open for anyone to see. It’s red blood on the white ice. There are no abattoirs: it can’t be hidden away.” Despite the attempts to stop it, the seal hunt continues in both forms – as an Indigenous method for survival and a massive commercial excursion. Inuit have adapted their traditions to the modern age yet cannot make a profit like this. Multiple anti-sealing campaigns claim to not be targeting Inuit seal hunting, but by making these products taboo, the market for seal products has dried up considerably. Without a place to sell their wares, the practice of traditional seal hunting is at risk of fading away. Lacking proper awareness of the cultural importance of seal hunting, environmental activists are endangering this millennium-long practice, which may soon be abandoned forever.

About the Author …

Ren Lashley graduated from the University of Illinois with a double major in English and Sociocultural Anthropology, spending much of their time dedicated to the environmental humanities. They also received certificates in Environmental Writing and Museum Studies. They are currently employed at the Museum of the Grand Prairie in Mahomet, Ill., and intend to pursue their master’s in library science and history at the University of Illinois in the spring.

This piece was written for ESE 477, Advanced Environmental Writing, in Fall 2023.