I was 12 years old when I killed my first seal. 1952. A huge male. He charged me when I got within 15 feet of him, and I was so scared, I swung away at him with the baseball bat I had in my hands. I didn't have a hakapik -- a heavy wooden club affixed with a sharp spike, used to kill seals -- back then. I must have hit him about 50 times before I was convinced he was dead. When I stopped, I realized my Dad and the rest of the crew were all laughing at me, at how excitable I was, wielding that bat. I think my father decided to throw me into the deep end of the seal hunting pool when he chose that male for my first kill. After that, anything would be easier.
On that same outing, I took 25 whitecoats (newborn harp seal pups). Back then, there were no regulations or government laws that banned killing the baby seals. It was much harder for me to do that. When you approach the babies, they become scared and tuck their heads into their bodies to protect themselves. It was terrible. It hurt my heart. But I didn't have a choice. Either I followed through to become a part of my Dad's crew, or I didn't, and I would go home for good. But I wanted to be part of the crew, so I did it. On the way home, he didn't say anything about my first outing with him and his crew. My mother asked him how I did, and she told me he was impressed. "You done good,” was what he said.
My mother was the one who convinced my Dad to take me on my first hunt. I begged him several times to take me, but he wouldn't budge, and I would end up crying for hours. He said I didn't have any experience, but the spirit? of adventure in the stories, he told about past hunts excited me. He would often recount a story his own father told him about an entire family who drowned on a hunt in the 1940s when their boat went adrift, hit some ice and went down. Nine of them. They didn't have any way of communicating what happened, and there were no helicopters then to make a rescue. There's a song about them – "La famille Lebel." I think my father told the story to show how dangerous life on the hunt could be. Respect the sea, respect the ice, he would say. They are more powerful than you. I learned the hard way.
It was sometime in the early 1970s. I went hunting with my cousins on the north point of Prince Edward Island. We had a 60ft. wooden boat and made a good haul, something like 2,100 pelts. But we ran into gale-force winds and drifted about 90 miles into Cabot Strait - into some heavy ice. We had to line the outside of the boat with pelts so the ice wouldn't pierce the hull. We were very nervous. But we had good communications, and were able to contact an icebreaker to help us out.
When the weather cleared, the coast guard came and got us. I've hunted seals for more than 50 years. It's easy to do, but you have to control your emotions. I used to question my actions, to try and figure out how I felt about what I was doing. But we humans are predators. Seals prey on other species. We kill other animals too. The cameras don't capture all the killing humans do. Cameras aren't allowed in many places where animals are slaughtered. The seal hunt, however, is out in the open, very public and easy to film. The important thing is to have respect for the animal. I wouldn't be able to kill knowing that the animal would suffer, so technique is very important. A quick kill, a quick blow to the top of the head with a hakapik is usually enough. Sometimes a seal continues to move after being hit, but that's normal. It's already dead. A biologist told me that that's the body's normal reaction.
Sometimes you hear people say we skin seals alive, but that is a lie. We are professionals and we follow the rules. Actually, we train young people how to handle seals humanely. I hunt seals because I need them. It's how I make a living. It's my life. Three of my sons are now part of my crew. It's their life now. I have a grandson who's just turning 12, the same age I was when I went on my first hunt. He asks a lot of questions about hunting. He is as excited about it as I was when I was his age, and is often on the shore with his mother, waiting for us to come into port at the end of the day. *** It used to be quiet on the ice. You were out there, hearing nothing except your own breath. When I went with my father that first time, we walked on the ice to get to the seals.
We used a row boat at certain points, but we did a lot of walking on shore ice. My Dad said it was important to pay attention to the color of the ice. White or blue ice was solid underfoot. Walking on grey ice would guarantee you an icy bath, or worse. When we came across higher cakes of ice, sometimes ten feet high, we would use an axe to make a path so we could continue on our way. Very low tech. No motorized boats, no helicopters, no noise back then. It's not quiet anymore. There's a lot of traffic above and on the ice now. There can be 50 helicopters hovering with protesters and tourists. I've hunted from helicopters and planes myself, and the catch is huge. One season, my cousins and I used a Cessna, and we took in 25 pelts per trip. We made quite a few trips and ended up with 400 to 500 pelts in one day. But I realized the noise scared the seals, and this affects their growth and the hunt. The noise frightens the mother seals, especially, and they leave their nursing babies and slide underneath the ice for cover. Sometimes they don't come back for hours, and this affects the babies' maturing process.
The protesters and all these celebrities say they care about the animals, but they don't seem to care about the mothers. Only the babies. They take the babies away from the mother and pose for pictures. They forget the mother. How is that respecting the animal? It's hypocritical. *** The Gulf hunt around the Madeleines was poor this year. It was the worst I've seen since I began hunting. There are about 75 to 80 boats, including my own, from the Madeleines. My own crew only took in 200 seals over three days. Normally, we can harvest 1,500 to 2,000 per season which lasts 5 or 6 days. There were lots of challenges this time around. Conditions were not conducive for hunting. The ice was not as widespread as before. Not many of the young seals had matured enough for us to take. Something is going on with their maturing process.
The DFO hunt quotas are also affecting us negatively. The quota for the Madeleines was 18,200 this year. To make a decent income, our crews would need to take 50,000 seals. We have to go farther and farther away from home base, sometimes 300 miles, to get to the seals - the beaters - that we can hunt legally. As crew captain, I can make $25,000 to $30,000 for the season – in a good season. This year, I didn't come to close to that. I only paid off my expenses. I didn't make any money. I have a contract, going on 12 years now, with Fisheries and Oceans Canada to put out and check their navigation buoys. That is an extra source of income for me.
Others are not so lucky. We're going to have to be very proactive in the coming years if we are going to maintain our way of life in the Madeleines. We just revived the islands' sealing association and we're going organize boycotts of those businesses and agencies that facilitate the protesters' activities. Rental car agencies, places that rent out helicopters, the hotels protesters stay in, the companies that provide fuel for the protesters' planes and helicopters. We're going to use the protesters' tactics against the protesters themselves. They only show up and spend money for about a week or two out of every year, but we live here. We are here all year round and are a major part of the economy here. We're going to have to advocate for ourselves to counteract the negativity around the hunt. The negative publicity about the hunt began to circulate in the 1970s.
First was the film that Quebec journalist Serge Deyglun shot. Then Brian Davies of Greenpeace came, and soon the word spread that we were bad people. I remember a group of sealers attacking a helicopter that was going to take Davies on the ice to film the hunt. After they were finished with it, the helicopter couldn't fly. But that didn't help our cause. The damage was shown to people all over the world, and the tide began to turn against us. In the 1980s, another Greenpeacer, Paul Watson, spoke against the hunt on a Madeleine radio station. But people knew what hotel he was staying in, and a crowd of about 300 found him, broke the door down, and took him off to the airport. I was frightened for him. Fortunately, for him he was only missing a few hairs on his head that someone grabbed while they dragged him out of the hotel. Somebody has a souvenir of the occasion. There were only 10 police officers on the Madeleines, so they couldn't do anything. Watson was put on a plane to Charlottetown, PEI.
Before the hunt started this year, I tried to talk to the Humane Society people, with Rebecca Aldworth, the director of the Canadian Wildlife Federation. She wished me good luck on the hunt this year. She said it was going to be my last. I told her that my sons and I were going to be back for sure. It was she who wasn't going to be here next time. She just laughed. She is Canadian herself, but her actions are not Canadian. We're going to make sure there'll be no planes and helicopters disturbing the animals and interfering in the hunt. This year? we managed to get Esso in the Madeleines to stop providing fuel to the protesters. We were happy we achieved that.
I called the head of the Sealing Association in Newfoundland, Frank Penhom, and asked him to do the same where he is. To get the oil companies to stop selling fuel to the activists. We're going to work hard on making that happen by the time next year's hunt starts on the front (another name for the hunt off Newfoundland). Our way of life didn't start a few years ago. It's hundreds of years old. I myself am Acadian, Quebecois and Canadian. Melting ice, the changes we're seeing to the seals' maturing process, new DFO hunt quotas and, especially, protestors, are driving me away from the life I know. I heard on the news that a beauty products' executive wants to buy us out, something like $16 million was offered. But that's not enough. She could offer $50 million or even $100 million, but no amount of money is enough. My father taught me this way of life. It's a tradition and I have respect for it. I can't be in a building in Vancouver or Montreal. That would destroy my life. Fishing, being on the ice, hunting for seals…that is my life.
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