Not to depress you all but perhaps our Canadian Kossacks could take some action.
Thousands of harp seal pups are assumed dead in Canada's Gulf of St Lawrence due to the lack of ice floes, which mother seals require to nurse their pups successfully.
Experts with the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), who have been carrying out daily surveillance flights over the region, report that the Gulf of St Lawrence - the annual birthing ground for hundreds of thousands of harp seals - is devoid of both ice and seals. Their report came as Canada announced a seal cull quota of 270,000 - down 30,000 from last year
Here's the link
I never understood why they had the seal hunt anyway but now it seems absolutely irresponsible.
"In the nine years I have observed the seal hunt, I've never seen conditions as bad as those I've witnessed in the past few days. Nothing could have prepared me for this devastation." Ms Fink has spent the past two months flying over ice floes for up to three hours at a time, counting the seal population She said: "The seals' habitat is melting away and we are anticipating nearly 100 per cent mortality among more than 260,000 seal pups the Canadian government indicates were born this year in the southern Gulf of St Lawrence."
The justification for continuing the hunt is that in the area there is no ice floes only 20% of the seals are taken there annually. They have lowered the quota by 30,000 but I would think that they should just cancel this all together. The seals are going to have a hard enough time as it is.
Not to depress all of you out there in Kossackland.
Some stuff via Wikipedia
Before the hunt in 2000, the sealing industry admitted that the demand for both seal meat and seal pelts was down. In 2001, Canadian government trade statistics revealed that 51% of Canada's two million pelts from seals killed between 1982-1999 had been sold.[49]
Of late, record high prices have been obtained for seal pelts at auctions in Canada ($70 per pelt up from $15 in the mid-1990s) and prices are even higher now than before the protests of the 1980s.[50] Recently, high-end fashion designers such as Donatella Versace and Gucci, as well as a number of high-profile graduates from major fashion schools, have begun to use seal pelts.[51]
According to the DFO, the harp seal population is now stable at about five million animals, three times as many seals as in the 1970s, and Canada's annual quota of roughly 325,000 harp seal (and an additional 10,000 harp seal allowance for new Aboriginal initiatives, personal use and Arctic hunts) does not significantly impact the harp seal population. Protestors often respond that this figure represents only a fraction of the total number of seals killed, because many seals' bodies fall into the water or under the ice and are not counted. The CVMA has replied that this is untrue for the Canadian seal hunt, and that the Canadian seals that have been "struck and lost" is less than five percent (16,250 animals) of the total harvest. They suggest that this is because, in Canada, the majority of seals are killed on the ice, not in the sea.[34] Animal rights groups point out that the population increase is due to the population recovering from the decimation of the 1970s.
Greenpeace has further stated that the quota is an unreliable estimate of the total kill, not only due to "struck and lost" statistics, but also because seals with pelt damage are discarded and not accounted for.[35]
According to Canadian authorities, the value of the 2004 seal harvest was $16.5 million CAD, which significantly contributes to the income of thousands of fishermen and First Nations peoples. For some sealers, they claim, proceeds from the hunt make up a third of their annual income. Critics, however, say that this represents only a tiny fraction of the $600-million Newfoundland fishing industry. Sealing opponents also say that $16.5 million is insignificant, compared to the funding required to regulate and subsidize the hunt. Although Canadian authorities deny that any such subsidizing exists, some unsubstantiated reports from protest groups have gone as far as to say that the hunt costs the Canadian people between $825 million and $1.65 billion per year.[36]. Some critics, such as the McCartneys (see below), have suggested that promoting that area as an eco-tourism site would be far more lucrative than the annual harvest. [37]