Seal hunting, or sealing, is the personal or commercial hunting of seals. Seal hunting is currently practiced in eight countries and one region of Denmark: Canada, the United States, Namibia, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Finland, Sweden, and Greenland. Most of the world's seal hunting takes place in Canada and Greenland. Canada's largest market for seals is Norway.
In the Canadian commercial seal hunt, the majority of the hunters initiate the kill using a firearm. Ninety percent of sealers on the ice floes of the Front (east of Newfoundland), where the majority of non-native seal hunting occurs, use firearms.
An older and more traditional method of killing seals is with a hakapik: a heavy wooden club with a hammer head and metal hook on the end. The hakapik is used because of its efficiency; the animal can be killed quickly without damage to its pelt. The hammer head is used to crush the seals' thin skulls, while the hook is used to move the carcasses. Canadian sealing regulations describe the dimensions of the clubs and the hakapiks, and caliber of the rifles and minimum bullet velocity, that can be used. They state: "Every person who strikes a seal with a club or hakapik shall strike the seal on the forehead until its skull has been crushed," and that "No person shall commence to skin or bleed a seal until the seal is dead," which occurs when it "has a glassy-eyed, staring appearance and exhibits no blinking reflex when its eye is touched while it is in a relaxed condition." Reportedly, in one study, three out of eight times, the animal was not rendered either dead or unconscious by shooting, and the hunters would then kill the seal using a hakapik or other club of a type that is sanctioned by the governing authority.
Hakapik
97 % of the seals are fewer than 3 months old. At least 35 000 of them died in 2015.
People just jump on the iceberg from their boats and start killing seals one by one. The ones that have the most fluffy fur are too young to swim away.
At the end, they are being killed because we want their fur. Even if you want it so bad, buy artificial one. I bet you won't see the difference!
