Seal Alert-SA Media Release 14 July 2010

Minister & SPCA Attends 1st Seal Pup Cull, 260 Seal Pups Killed, but Where is 1000’s of Seal Pups Threatening the Hake Fishery ?

3rd August 2009 looking south at the sealing area from seal walkway at Cape Cross, a small group of seals and seals directly in front of walkway

Comments in the visitors book at Cape Cross

Yesterday the Minister of Fisheries, fishery officials and the SPCA all made their first attendance at Namibia’s annual seal cull at Cape Cross. Contrary to media reports Seal Alert-SA had not been invited nor had any other animal rights organizations. The SPCA is not an animal rights organization.

Of the annual seal pup TAC of 80 000. The TAC for Cape Cross is 50 000 pups. According to Dr BJ Van Zyl deputy director of Marine Resources at the Ministry of Fisheries in order for the seal pup cull to be sustainable, 30 per cent of the seal pups born in December can be culled. The last seal pup count supplied by the Ministry for Cape Cross was 65 000 pups born in December 2005.

According to Debbie Gibson of the SPCA the official govt party observed approximately 20 000 seal pups directly in front of the seal viewing tourist walkway and just a few groups of seals to the left of the seal walkway to the south. The southern area for obvious reasons to avoid upsetting the tourists with the sealers tyre tracks is the area in the part of the seal colony sealers use to do the seal cull.

Although the sealers informed the SPCA that the seal factory in Henties Bay can process 1000 seal pups a day. 260 seal pups were culled. The explanation given for this low number for the start of the seal cull on day one, was that the sealer’s truck could not load more seals.

Seal Alert has photographed the sealers using a trailer as well, and questions why the trailer was not used.

The SPCA has stated it is not their mandate to assess the sustainability of the seal cull or matters relating to conservation.

For the second year in a row, Seal Alert-SA has managed to delay the start of the seal cull by two weeks. As each day won, gives the seal pups who will begin weaning soon, a fighting chance of leaving the seal colony and avoid being clubbed to death.

Seal Alert-SA’s concern. The Ministry’s seal pup count does not match the evidence at Cape Cross. Seal Alert-SA sent in its photographer last year, who was also abducted and arrested by the sealers, but not before he had recorded almost no seal pups left in the sealing area at Cape Cross, just two weeks after the 139 day sealing season had started. His photographic evidence showed just one group of seals, and after walking the 2km the seal colony stretches down the beach to the south. Observed less than 500 seal pups in total. Previous photographic evidence recorded in previous years showed the entire seal colony collapses from disturbance by the sealers by mid-August, each year taken by aerial photography.

The Ministry has refused to reveal how many seal pups were harvested since 2006.

In order for the sealers at Cape Cross to fill their pup TAC. They would be required to cull at least 1600 seal pups each morning before the seal colony completely collapses. Either this low number of 260 seal pups was to appease the Minister and stick to the regulations, or the fact remains, there are just not enough seals left.

As the sealers have less than 30 days to fill their TAC quota of 50 000 pups. Seal Alert cannot see how a daily seal pup cull of 260 pups is remotely economically viable or sustainable. As it is projected that sealers will only be able to cull 7800 seal pups before the colony collapses, far short of the 50 000 pup TAC for Cape Cross.

The visitors book at Cape Cross seal colony tell a grim tale of visitors recording pleas to the Namibian govt to please stop killing seals.

A program aired on SABC called 50/50 recorded some startling comments.

Steve Kirkman was appointed by the Namibian Government to advise them on seal clubbing, but was given 24hours to leave the country when his advice clashed with official government policy.

Steve Kirkman – Seal Biologist: Harvesting is a very disturbing process, and will cause allot of disturbance in the colony and in Namibia those same colonies are harvested day after day, so there is allot of disturbance. So for the pups that are not killed their feeding regime is basically disrupted allot of them will end up being deserted, at the moment I don’t think they are considering the much higher first year mortality they are causing there.

André: The small group of seal clubbers have work for only three months per year. Their pay is shockingly low and they have to love in cardboard shacks near the factories.

Johannes Naftalie, Unemployed Fisherman and Seal Clubber:  I don’t like to kill these seals, but what can they do? They haven’t got any choices. There must be a campaign, there is nothing like that in this place.

André: The tourists who come here to see the biggest colony of Cape Fur Seals find it strange that there are so few of them. They were very upset when we told them that we were two weeks into the seal clubbing season and that the morning’s slaughter was just over.

Thomas Krebs – German Tourist: We were really shocked especially, I mean the term harvesting, it is a very cruel thing to do. How they do it … the culling, just slaughter the very, very young seals. It is a very cruel thing I think and it is just not right.

Harry de Groot – Dutch Tourist: Little slaughter of big slaughter every morning. It’s terrible to hear it because we didn’t know. So that’s so terrible to hear that it happens over here. It must be stopped.

André: To Steve Kirkman, an experts on seals, the seal clubbing quotas, that are now at about 90 000 seals per year, make no sense at all. There is no data that indicates that this practice is sustainable and when he warned the Namibian government about it, he got his marching orders.

Steve Kirkman: The way it is done there is that the minister basically says beforehand he won’t accept less than so much and so when we came along and advised to do half of that, it wasn’t take too well I guess.

Global anti-seal hunt supporters are pushing Francois Hugo of Seal Alert-SA to visit the seal cull in Namibia. However as the Minister has refused to grant Seal Alert access to the seal colony and seal cull, Seal Alert is powerless to assess the sustainability of the seal cull or observe