Ocean Sentry
This is the official figure from Canada’s Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) and excludes seals who were wounded but got away, which officials refer to as “struck and lost”.
These injured seals, shot but not killed, slipped away only to die later after bledding to death.
Considering the large concentrations of harp seals during breeding season, the hunt in Canada has been described as the largest slaughter of marine mammals in the world.
In Canada, harp seals are also at-risk of entanglement where an estimated 17,000 are killed in gillnets in Newfoundland each year. Additionally, in the northeastern United States about 400 harp seals are estimated to be killed each year by entanglement in multispecies sink gillnet fisheries.
And as climate change continues to degrade the amount of good ice, the average pup survival rate is likely to drop over the years, experts say.
