Nasty weather has prevented researchers for the International Fund for Animal Welfare from observing the first day of the controversial annual Canadian seal hunt.

In a phone interview with the Georgia Straight from Charlottetown, IFAW veteran Sheryl Fink said that her team made it halfway to the Magdalen Islands in the Gulf of St. Lawrence before turning back because of fog and mist.

“We’ve been expecting a landsmen hunt to have started today off the northwest side of the Magdalen Islands,” Fink said. “We have been told the seals are close to shore.”

She said that last week, the federal government set a quota for killing 280,000 seal pups in the annual hunt. “The are about three weeks old,” Fink said. “They’ll be seals that are freshly weaned and just starting to moult their white fur.”

Fink added that she expects to be able to make it out tomorrow. It will be her eighth year observing hunters  killing baby seals.

“Legally, they can use a rifle or a hakapick, which is like a club with a steel spike on the end,” she said. “Predominantly here in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, we see seals being killed with a hakapick.”

When asked how she feels observing this event, she replied, “Sometimes it makes me really angry, especially if I can see the rules aren’t being followed—which we see fairly regularly.”

Fink explained that the sealers are very competitive, and basically race against each other. “This is one of the biggest problems with the hunt,” she said. “What we see is seals being stunned with a hakapick—bang bang bang. The first seal will start to regain consciousness because it wasn’t properly killed. It wasn’t properly checked for unconsciousness. It wasn’t properly bled out to make sure that it wasn’t going to come back to life.”

She added that the federal government has changed the regulations  in an attempt to  prevent this from occurring. “I’m very anxious to see if this is actually happening on the ice or not this year,” Fink said. “Certainly in the past, we’ve seen atrocious examples of seals that have been clubbed but haven’t been killed immediately—and are suffering a great deal.”

Fink dismissed economic arguments for holding the annual hunt. She said the entire landed value of last year’s hunt, which killed 217,000 seals, was $7 million.

Fisheries and Oceans Canada estimates there are 7,000 sealers, she said, which works out to an average of $1,000 per hunter.

She claimed that the federal government spends a great deal of money sending delegations of politicians to Europe to try to defend against European bans.

She added that federal funds are also used to market seal products and to pay for icebreakers to make things easier for hunters.

“If all that money was put into finding an alternative to sealing for these people who do get a little bit of money from it, that would be money much better spent,” Fink said. “We know a majority of Canadians are opposed to this hunt. We know a majority of Canadians do not want their taxes spent supporting and promoting this hunt. And we think people deserve better.”