One of two grey seals found on Port Hood beach showing signs of head trauma

On the evening of Monday, February 23 I received a report of two grey seals on the beach in Port Hood. One was dead and the other still alive and suffering. Both showed signs of trauma to the head. There were 4-wheeler tracks in the snow, leading to the belief that someone had ridden along the beach and bludgeoned any seals they found. There was a third larger carcass that had been there for some time, unrelated to Monday night's incident.

I immediately contacted the Inverness RCMP who referred the matter to DFO and gave me a 1-800 number to call to inquire as to the status of my complaint.

A couple of hours later I rang the 1-800 number and was told that the matter had been resolved. I asked for clarification, namely that someone had gone down and assisted the wounded pup and whether they planned to investigate the matter. The person to whom I spoke refused to give me further details, simply saying, "The situation with the seals has been resolved and the complaint has been resolved." I requested that someone call me with further details and was told that she would take my name and number but I would likely not be contacted unless DFO felt it necessary to do so.

Pup left alive and suffering after being beaten

After further inquiries with another DFO official, I discovered that on Monday night there were no DFO personnel available to investigate my complaint so the matter was referred back to the police. An officer attended at the beach and despite my explicit directions on where to find the seals, he could not locate them and left the pup to suffer alone on the beach until death finally came. I was told that a second officer attended at the beach the next day and could not locate the seals due to a winter storm. As of Wednesday evening, the dead seals were still lying on the beach. Finally, on Thursday, a DFO officer located one seal and was making a second trip to locate the pup. I received a call from the police officer who had attended at the beach on Monday night. He advised me that on Monday night John MacIntyre of DFO had told him there had been a report that seals might have been harmed, advised that no DFO personnel was available since everyone was in Moncton, and requested that he go down the next day to investigate. I had called to advise that a seal had been bludgeoned and was left suffering, and DFO Conservation & Protection requested that the report be investigated THE NEXT DAY. Bad weather was cited as the reason for the delay, yet someone had managed to locate the seals on the beach Monday evening and someone else had managed to find the seals on the beach on Wednesday evening. I have no doubt that if a report had come in that a wounded sealer lay injured, bleeding and suffering on the beach, DFO and local police would have managed to scramble down past the boardwalk to locate him. But the general opinion in that area is "a good seal is a dead seal". I guess they consider a wounded and suffering seal to also be a "good seal". Good enough not to bother trying to help.

I have posed the question to DFO and to the police - Why was I advised that night that "the situation with the seals has been resolved and the complaint has been resolved" when clearly it was NOT resolved? To date, I have not received a response to my question.

DFO's Arthur LeBlanc claims seals may have died "from natural causes" - perhaps this seal slipped and fell?

When contacted by media in Port Hawkesbury, DFO's Cheticamp detachment supervisor Arthur LeBlanc stated that it's difficult to tell if the seals were clubbed or died of natural causes, adding that there are "multiple possibilities to what could have happened."

Luckily, the person who found the seals took photos and as you can see, there appear to be clear signs of head trauma. I am uncertain as to Mr. LeBlanc's definition of "natural causes". Perhaps the blood-soaked plank by the pup's head was the result of a gale force wind blowing the plank repeatedly onto the head of the pup? Perhaps the seal in the snow had tripped and fallen, hitting his head repeatedly on the ground?

Sadly, this is not an isolated incident. Such killings are common in Nova Scotia. I've been told that in Cape Breton "a good seal is a dead seal." Nuisance licenses are issued to Nova Scotia fishermen to deal with seals interfering with fishing gear, but it is open to interpretation as to whether a seal basking in the sun on a beach is "interfering with fishing gear" and all too often seals are bludgeoned or shot where they are found and left to die and rot. Fishermen are not required to retrieve the carcasses of "nuisance seals", nor are they required to report the kill. Just how many seals are killed under a nuisance license is unknown. Each spring, dozens of headless pups wash up on the shores of Port Hood, all of which are explained away by DFO as the pups being caught in shifting ice or being struck by boats. It is never admitted that dead pups are a result of someone taking a plank or bat to them. Each year bloated and festering seal carcasses are found on our shores by horrified tourists, many the result of fishermen shooting or bludgeoning them as "nuisance" seals or the result of "sport".

In 2007 a local resident reported a number of dead grey seal pups on Oak Island. It appeared the pups had starved to death. DFO put their deaths down to natural causes, saying they likely starved to death when their mothers abandoned them, but it had nothing to do with the fact that hunters had been on the island recently killing seals and either killing the mothers or frightening them away. DFO discounted the theory that the mothers had been scared away by hunters, leaving their pups to starve or indeed had been killed by sealers. It is absurd to me that DFO would claim that a hunt on Oak Island was not the cause of these pups being separated from their mothers and starving to death!

DFO's Arthur LeBlanc claims seals may have died "from natural causes."

There is a deep-seated hatred of grey seals in the fishing industry. Seals are blamed for the collapse of the cod fishery and its failure to rebound. This theory is not supported by scientific evidence and is out of touch with reality. Fishermen maintain because there are more seals, that means less fish. They will not admit that perhaps the fact that there are more fishing boats, there are less fish! Yet the government of Nova Scotia continues to claim that less seals means more fish. Minister Chisholm has been calling for an expansion of the grey seal hunt, insisting that Sable Island be opened to fishermen so large concentrations of grey seals can be slaughtered to aid in groundfish recovery. It is disturbing that our provincial government is fostering this hatred for seals by encouraging the misconception that seals are eating all the fish when science does not support that claim. Seals are suffering as a result of this governmental stupidity. Seals being hunted in a so-called "commercial" capacity, or seals being killed in the name of bogus "research on killing methods" or seals killed for sport on the cold and lonely beaches of Port Hood. They are all suffering, and our government and fishermen are to blame.