Fishes and other Sea Animals Articles from All-Creatures.org

Canada Wants To Market Seal Meat As A Seafood Delicacy To Boost Demand For The Controversial Product

From SpeciesUnite.com
March 2024

Canadian Senate Fisheries Committee meeting, the minister, Diane Lebouthillier, testified that seal meat could be rebranded as a premium product similar to lobster through federal marketing efforts. 'Listen, we have a new product we must exploit, making it a consumer product is a priority. When properly prepared, it is delicious. We did it with lobster. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel.'

PLEASE SIGN: Urge Canada to end its commercial seal hunt that beats pups to death

Ruvim Miksanskiy - Unsplash.com

The issue:

Canada’s commercial seal collapsed in 2009 after the European Union banned the export of seal products. Now, Canada’s new Department of Fisheries and Oceans Minister is planning to revive the struggling industry by marketing seal meat as a seafood delicacy to Canadians.

At a Senate Fisheries Committee meeting, the minister, Diane Lebouthillier, testified that seal meat could be rebranded as a premium product similar to lobster through federal marketing efforts.

"Listen, we have a new product we must exploit," said Lebouthillier during the meeting in early February. "Making it a consumer product is a priority. When properly prepared, it is delicious. We did it with lobster. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel.

According to Lebouthillier plans to push seal meat are already underway, with promotional work being done on the ground with the hotel industry to ‘bring seal to the table’.

The move comes as Canada’s annual seal hunt gears up for the 2024 season, set to begin in just a few weeks.

Although the scale of the commercial hunt has plummeted dramatically due to global concerns over animal welfare and numerous international trade bans on seal goods, hundreds of thousands of seals are still slaughtered each year.

The animals:

The controversial event is the largest authorized slaughter of marine mammals on the planet, with seals bludgeoned, stabbed, and shot to death. Staggeringly, 97 percent of the seals killed are pups typically under three months old and often as young as 12 weeks old.

Scientific reports on the hunt have found that the way these babies are killed violates Canada’s animal welfare standards and that in 42% of cases studied, there was insufficient evidence of cranial injury to the clubbed seals to guarantee they were unconscious during skinning.

Current plans to expand the demand for seal products is one of the top two threats facing harp seals, alongside the rising temperatures caused by climate change, melting their ice habitats.

Recently, Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) adjusted their estimate of the harp seal population from 7.4 million to 4.7 million. We should be taking action to protect them from climate threats, not finding new incentives to slaughter them.

---

Return to Fishes and Other Sea Animals Articles
Read more at Wildlife Articles