Fishery management and marine mammal culls

In the summer of 2006, smoke rose from an industrial incinerator in the Norwegian Arctic.


A few months earlier, harp seals had gathered on the pack ice off northwestern Russia for their annual ritual of renewal - of birth and mating. Whitecoat pups emerged, wet and bleating, from their mothers. Males arrived, singing for mates. Pups fattened, moulted their white baby fur. Then the hunters came, for their ritual - destruction. They killed ten thousand seals, sailed back to Norway, delivered the bloodied skins to their local tannery. But the tanning company had no market for the pelts, so by early summer, the remains of the ten thousand seals were burnt.


All – the killing, the burning – paid for by government subsidies.


Newspaper account of this (in Norwegian)


While smoke rose over the fjords, people gathered on a tropical island. The International Whaling Commission was meeting again, representatives from dozens of nations gathering for their annual ritual, argument over humanity's dealings with whales. The Saint Kitts and Nevis Declaration gave whaling nations their first significant victory for decades. It included reference to how whales “consume huge quantities of fish...requiring that the issue of management of whale stocks must be considered in a broader context of ecosystem management”.


Like iPods and hybrid cars, marine mammal hunting is a growth industry of first decade of the 21st Century. Hunting has become, once again, the main way that seals die at the hands of men. The number of individuals, and species, of whales killed by whaling has increased too. This is just the start. Plans are afoot to return to much larger-scale commercial whaling in the name of “ecosystem-based fishery management”. Such an approach sounds great in principle, but what does it mean? Fishermen's complaints that marine mammals eat their fish is nothing new. What's new is the explicit link being made between hunting marine mammals and effective – scientific - fisheries management.


Being mammals of the land, we venture the ocean on boats, our moving mechanical islands. Even when fishermen choose to look down and think, seawater, the medium in which our fisheries disasters are wrought, blankets evidence of our blunders. Unlike some of our mistakes on land, our marine errors are forever hidden from view. They reveal themselves in fisheries statistics and the writings of scientists, as impenetrable as a murky sea at night to most of us.


Over the past decade, the appearance of studies in premier scientific journals illuminating yet one more marine disaster – fish populations reduced to a tenth or less of their former abundance, fisheries to disappear by the middle of this century – has become another ritual. But only the price of fish, or perhaps comments by celebrity chefs, cause some of us to pay attention. Mostly, we don't notice at all. Fishermen notice, because they work longer, travel further, catch less. And as fish disappear, some fishermen see other marine predators eating some scraps we've missed, and question their right to exist.


Marine mammals, called to the surface to breathe, pull attention to themselves, as they always have. Predatory fish, breathing seawater, escape blame. Ecosystem collapses, driven by overfishing and pollution, occur on scales of time and space beyond imagining. Old men's remembrances of better times become mere fishermen's tales. But marine mammals, forced by their need for air – our shared mammalian heritage - are noticed, and so become scapegoats for our mismanagement.


Mammals have long been part of our marine dreaming, scapegoats being their latest role. Selkies, the seal-people of Celtic myth, spoke of peoples' connection to the sea. On the far side of the world, the Yuin people of southeast Australia knew individual killer whales as reincarnated family. Job used Leviathan to project an image of incomprehensible power. In Moby Dick, Melville gave form to malevolence through the perils of open-boat whaling. Harp seal pups, poster children of modern environmentalism, queried our brutality with those huge liquid eyes. The recent saga of Keiko, Freeing Willy for real, ends with death in a Norwegian fjord, a modern parable of the failure of good intentions.


But in the minds of hunters, marine mammals have morphed from resources for harvesting into pests for culling. The Norwegian hunt for harp seals off northwestern Russia in 2006 demonstrates where this leads – wasteful killing of unmarketable animals. At the same time in most Western nations, marine mammals have gone from resources into animals worthy of cherishing. Both metamorphoses are profound, but the darker version remains unnoticed. And now, it has found form. Conceptualizing marine mammals as pests finds its reality in the hunters' version of “ecosystem-based fishery management”.