Namibia’s plan to club 86,000 seals draws protests

WINDHOEK, Namibia – Saying it wants to save its fishing industry, this southern African nation is letting seal hunters club more seals than last year in an annual hunt that began this week.

But animal rights activists say killing thousands of adult males and tens of thousands of pups is cruel and unnecessary because fishing boats are the real culprits behind the decline in Namibia’s fish stocks.

The sparsely populated country is famous for the wildlife and desert landscape of its Skeleton Coast. Among the tourist attractions are the 850,000 seals that live on about a dozen rocky, remote islands off the southwest Atlantic coast.

The government says the seals are consuming 900,000 tons of fish a year, more than a third of the fishing industry’s catch. The seals are also an important source of skins for leather and fur goods, and meat for animal feed.

The hunt started July 1 and runs for five months. The start follows a government announcement last week that it would allow the killing of 6,000 adult males and 80,000 pups, up by 20,000 in 2006.

Francois Hugo, a spokesman for the Namibian conservation group Seal Alert, said the government was trying to push fish catches to more than 1.5 million tons a year, a level last seen three decades ago.

“This is now impossible, as the government keeps on increasing the fishing quotas. It’s not the seals that are at blame here. It’s the many trawlers on its waters,” he said. “Namibia is culling nursing pups still suckling on their mothers’ milk, which have nothing to do with fish.”

The government accused the activists of “deliberately distorting information,” and said controlling the seal population was important for both the fishing industry and to the people who worked in jobs created by the hunt.

Namibia maintains that the country’s seal population is healthy and hunting will not lead to the extinction of the species. But Seal Alert calls the method – clubbing, to maintain the quality of skins – inhumane.