Local author, anthropologist tries to show the humanity of the practices
Published on 3/13/2006

Paul McCartney and his wife, Heather, examine a seal pup March 2 on the ice floes off Iles de la Madeleine, in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, as part of a protest against Canada's annual seal hunt.

     The McCartneys were seeking publicity, and getting it, as part of a broad and long-running campaign by animal rights activists to stop the hunting of harp seals.

     But if you accept what Janice Henke says, it would have been more humane for the McCartneys to serenade the local hunters as they shot the seals.

     Henke is an expert on the seal hunt and the fight to stop it. She has traveled into the frozen reaches of Canada to observe the hunt and debated leaders of the animal rights movement on Canadian television.

     The hunt is humane, she said. It is important to the local economy in Newfoundland. And it is a better way of controlling the explosive growth of the harp seal population than allowing them to starve.

     The animal rights movement has used images of cute baby seals to manipulate public opinion worldwide and galvanize bans of seal products.

     Infamous video footage has been replayed around the world showing sealers clubbing the fluffy white harp seals. It looks like men killing kittens.

     But the harvesting of the white baby seals has been illegal since 1987. Hunters must now wait until the animals are 10 or 12 weeks old, after they lose their white coat for one that is black and gray, coarse and water-repellent.

     Few seals are clubbed any more -- most are shot -- but clubbing kills quickly, Henke said. The slaughter is shocking, she said, because it takes place in the open, but it's no worse than the slaughter of other animals, like cattle, that takes place out of sight.

     The bias against seal-hunting is a "cultural preference position," Henke said, stirred up by a protest movement that plays off the cuteness of the seals to collect millions of dollars in donations from thousands of Big Mac lovers.

     And, Henke added, nothing is wrong with whaling, either.

     Janice Henke and her husband, Bob, a retired conservation officer, live in a log house that Bob built across a field on Route 40, just south of the village. (Bob Henke writes a weekly outdoors column and a biweekly opinion column for The Post-Star.)

     Their three children have grown up and left home, but three dogs, two cats and an active school of guppies keep them company in the house.

     Outside, on this overcast afternoon, chickens were scurrying across their pen and into and out of a door in their coop.

     As Henke spread whaling and sealing books across her dining room table, she nodded out the big window toward the edge of the field, where a doe had slipped out of the trees. She sees about six of them a day, she said.

NATHAN PALLACE - NPALLACE@POSTSTAR.COM Anthropologist and local author Janice S. Henke, who resides in Argyle, sits with one of her three cats, Quimby, in her home below a wall of hunting rifles.

     Near the house, the Henkes' yard was strung with electric wire -- to make sure, she said, that their dogs don't chase the deer.

     Inside, the house was part hunting lodge, part animal shelter.

     Three big dogs padded through the rooms and lolled on the floor. All were dogs "no one else wanted." One -- the field setter named Lucy who was sprawled under the table -- had been rescued by Bob from a veterinary office as she was being led away to be euthanized.

     A set of deer antlers was mounted over the table -- Bob's from last season -- and a deer head, their son Robert's "first and only deer," hung on the back wall.

     A beautiful, fierce black bear skin was hanging in a narrow hallway between the dining room and living room, but no one had shot the bear. It was killed by a tractor-trailer, Henke explained, and her husband saved the skin.

     An array of rifles on the wall seemed to be guarding the living room couch. "Bob's guns," Janice explained, except for one -- the pink .22, which will be her granddaughter's first gun.

     Henke became interested in the whaling and sealing protests more than 25 years ago and traveled in 1981 to the Gulf of St. Lawrence to observe the hunt.

     In 1982, she went out on a sealing boat off the coast of Newfoundland, cooking for the crew and watching them work.

     She ate seal meat in the course of her field work, she said -- "it was good, like duck."

     She saw that the sealers killed the seals humanely, she said, with a shot or a crushing blow to the head, and that they used all parts of the animal -- the pelts for clothing like vests and ski boots, the blubber for food supplement capsules of Omega 3 oils and the meat for food.

     More seals than ever -- about 350,000 of them -- will be taken by sealers this spring but none of the products they harvest will be sold locally because U.S. law forbids it.

     The law is a "cultural preference," Henke said, based not on science but on our perception of marine mammals like seals and whales as somehow inappropriate prey.

     In 1983, she said, the harp seal population in Canadian waters was almost 2 million. It is now almost 6 million, she said, and overcrowding is leading to violent aggression among the males.

     "They're biting and digging each other," she said. "It's a sad situation."

     Similarly, she said, international agreements ban all commercial whaling, even though some species, like the minke whales, have thriving populations numbering in the hundreds of thousands.

     It's our "sovereign right" as a country to ban marine mammal products, Henke said softly.

     "But there's no scientific justification for it." Henke published her book on sealing -- "Seal Wars" -- in 1985. Last summer, she finished her doctoral dissertation on the protest movement against whaling, which she plans to revise for publication.

     The McCartneys and other activists are trying to make a moral claim, she said, while ignoring the science. "They never want to talk about wildlife management concerns. The goal of wildlife management in Canada," she said, in reference to sealing, "is to get the herd down to a sustainable level."

     Henke fingered a collection of seal ornaments on her table -- a soapstone carving done by an Inuit that she found at an antiques shop in Salem; a fat, seal candle; a little white ceramic seal; and a cutesy knickknack of an Inuit child bending down to kiss the snout of a fluffy white baby harp seal.

     "But no Inuit has ever seen a harp pup," she said, "because the Inuit live in the Arctic," and the harp seals are born in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and only travel to the Arctic later, when they're bigger.

     And, she added, Inuit children would be unlikely to get that close to any harp seal, unless it was at dinner.