No animal-rights uproar in China over Canada's seal hunts

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Forget the Old World animal ethics of Europe. Canada is taking its seal hunt where the money is -- to China.

Despite all the hubbub about the European Union's sanctions on the seal hunt, Europe is a relatively small market for Canadian seal products. But China is a big buyer, with greater potential and none of the uproar about animal rights that has made the seal industry a pariah in the Western world.

That's why Canada Fisheries Minister Gail Shea and executives from five Canadian seal-industry companies are in China now, teaming up to work the market that could ensure the survival of Canada's moribund hunt. "There's huge market potential here," Shea said.

Shea is in China to introduce a seal-fur line at a fashion show at the China Fur and Leather Products Fair in Beijing. She'll also try to ease red tape for seal meat imports.

"They have a completely different approach over here," Bernard Guimont, president of Magdalen Islands seal products exporter Tamasu Inc., said from Beijing. "That's why we think it's a market that for sure has a great future for us."

The animal-rights activism of groups that attack the seal hunt as inhumane, featuring such celebrities as Paul McCartney and images of red blood staining white snow, has won a ban in Europe. But despite efforts to reproduce the campaigns in Hong Kong, the movement has yet to take hold in Chinese culture, where a tradition of eating a wide variety of animals, including dogs, makes it relatively immune to emotional appeals to spare cute seals.

"The Chinese eat anything. And they simply don't understand why you would put one animal above another," said Wayne Mackinnon, chairman of DPA Industries, which exports Omega 3 seal-oil capsules made from harp seal blubber. "I suspect that over the course of the next decade, the Chinese market alone could take all the seal products that we could make."

Sales of seal-oil products like DPA's might surpass sales of seal fur that was long the hunt's raison d'etre, but the collapsing economics of the fur industry threaten Mr. Mackinnon's business too: Unless sealers are hunting seals for fur, he won't get blubber at a reasonable price.

With pelts fetching only about $15, many sealers stayed home during last year's hunt, taking only a quarter of the catch allowed by Ottawa.

The landed value of the pelts totaled less than $1-million.

Ottawa, however, spent large sums campaigning against last year's EU decision to ban seal products.

But those efforts are more about culture wars than commercial deals. The federal government wanted to stop sanctions to protect the hunt's international reputation, and because siding with hunters over celebrity animal-rights activists from Europe was an obvious political choice for Conservative party politicians.

But in commercial terms, Europe was small potatoes: Most Canadian sales there were to fur processors, who sold their goods to other countries, but only about 10 percent of the retail market was there. Most of Canada's exports are split between Russia and China.

China, rapidly becoming the world's manufacturing powerhouse, has been the center of fur manufacturing for a decade, and its newly affluent millions have made it a bigger retail market too, Guimont said.

The Beijing fur show is rapidly becoming one of the largest in the world; the biggest is in Hong Kong.

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)

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