An opponent of the annual commercial seal hunt has urged Canadians to support a bill in the Senate to abolish it.

On March 3, Liberal senator Mac Harb introduced legislation to ban commercial seal hunting in Canada.

Rebecca Aldworth, director of the Canadian office of Humane Society International, told the Georgia Straight in a phone interview that her organization has made it easy to register support for Harb's bill through its Web site.

“This is the first time that Canadians have had a potential piece of legislation to rally around--and we have to show overwhelmingly that Canadians want the seal hunt to stop,” Aldworth said. “Finally, we are being given a political avenue to do that. We need to all get behind Sen. Harb’s bill and ensure he has the support he needs to push this forward in the Senate.”

Today (March 23), Aldworth and five other observers flew by helicopter onto the ice floes in the Gulf of St. Lawrence to witness the first day of the sanctioned hunt of baby seals.

“As we came close to the Magdalen islands, we were flying at a few hundred feet,” Aldworth said. “We started to see blood all across the ice and carcasses. This is something we see every year where we get close to where the hunting occurs. It was devastating for us.”

Humane Society International's Rebecca Aldworth urges Canadians to support legislation ban to commercial seal hunting in Canada. Humane Society International Canada photo

The team of observers landed on the ice and walked toward the hunters, taking the first pictures of this year's slaughter.

Aldworth noted that just two weeks earlier, Humane Society International Canada officials were on the same ice floes with newborn seals that were still nursing from their mothers.

“Those are the pups that were killed today,” she said.

Seal hunters are permitted to use rifles while hunting from the sea, but they use clubs on the ice floes, according to Aldworth. That’s because if they use rifles on land or on the ice, there’s a danger that the bullets might ricochet back and wound or kill the hunters.

Humane Society International photo

“These sealers had already killed all of the pups in the area and were now removing the skins and leaving the carcasses to rot on the ice floes,” she said.

Researchers from the International Fund for Animal Welfare were unable to land near today's hunt because of the terrible weather. Aldworth said her group, on the other hand, managed to get through because of a break between two weather systems, despite lots of fog and freezing rain.

"We went for a very narrow corridor," Aldworth said. 

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