IN 1999, GARRY TROAKE OF TWILLINGATE, A YOUNG FISHER and respected advocate of the landsman seal hunt in Newfoundland, reflected on the frustrations of trying to maintain a responsible and sustainable harvest in the face of what he saw as conflicting scientific information, erratic government regulations, and emotionally charged accusations from those who did not understand the intricate interrelationships in coastal communities among all creatures – human as well as nonhuman – of the land and sea:

Troake’s comments demonstrate the profound tensions that have been forged in the cauldron of pro- and anti-sealing politics since the late 1960s, when a cacophony of voices erupted over Canadian sealing, as politicians, media, pro- and anti-sealing activists, celebrities, and ordinary people argued about the legitimacy of the settler Newfoundland seal hunt.² The ensuing debates have become sites of creating knowledge about Newfoundland sealing masculinity and have frequently been freighted with emotion; yet the sealers’ own embodied experiences and emotions in relation to their work and their masculinity have been muffled. Pressured by Newfoundland cultural expectations to project an image of stoic, working-class heroism and denounced by anti-sealing activists and international media as hyper-masculine and unfeeling, sealers have struggled to position their subjectivity within a discursive vortex that has swirled around them yet largely excluded them from the conversation. This difficulty has increased with the explosive growth of social media in the 21st century – a phenomenon that has given a louder voice to outside observers while virtually muting rural sealers because of their geographical peripherality, limited bandwidth access, and economic marginality.

Particularly frustrating for the sealers has been the stark contrast that has been drawn between working-class primary producers and environmentalists. In environmental discourse about marine life, male animal rights and animal welfare activists have been cast as seal saviours and shepherds of all the creatures of the seas: an embodiment of gentle, ethical ecomasculinity.³ In juxtaposition, the sealer has appeared as a symbol of waste and rapine – a barbarian who, out of ignorance or greed or both, is devastating the environment: “the club-wielding, gun-toting Canadian embarrassment.”⁴ Missing from the frame has been the conservationism, the determination to maintain ecological balance, that has undergirded Newfoundland sealing masculinity – a perspective that has been evidenced by sealers’ return to the traditional, sustainable landsman hunt, their determination to maintain humane killing methods, and their renewed efforts to utilize the entire animal in processing as well as their concerns about the impact of increasing seal herds on other marine species. Also missing has been any understanding of sealers as emotionally embodied creatures with the capacity to manifest a whole range of feelings, from affection and empathy to fear, pain, and frustration.

Parsing life narratives and other self-representations of sealers on Newfoundland’s northeast coast, this article situates the sealers’ thoughts, bodies, and emotions in the sealing controversy of the past 50 years.⁵ It explores sealers’ performance of respectable masculinity as humane and responsible harvesters who have a legitimate place within the ecosystem of the northwestern Atlantic. And it will challenge practitioners and theorists of ecomasculinity to find a more inclusive way to have conversations with rural harvesters, local economies, and resource-based ways of life.⁶

1 Two types of sealing have been carried out by European settlers and their descendants on the northeast coast of Newfoundland over the past four centuries. In its original articulation, the seal fishery was a landsman hunt, carried out by men, women, and children as seals (primarily adults) came into bays and harbours, where they were netted or harvested from small boats. Communities utilized the entire animal: meat and flippers fed humans and work dogs; pelts (both waterproof and warm) became hats, coats, mitts, and boots; blubber was rendered into oil for heating and lighting. From the late 18th century onwards, as larger vessels were able to go out further to the actual whelping ice of the harp seals, and as a demand for seal oil arose to light the streets and grease the machine belts of the industrial age, the hunt focused on whitecoats (newborn harp seals) and the thick protective coating of blubber under their fur. This effort was carried out on a much greater and more destructive scale than the landsman hunt. Vessel owners dispatched sealers to the Labrador Front (“the Front”)⁷ with the toast “Bloody decks and a bumper crop!” By the 1830s and 1840s, seal skin production often exceeded 400,000 pelts per year, with totals in the 600,000 range in four of those years.⁸ This intensification of effort led to over-harvesting of the resource; it also radically changed the relationship of many sealers to their livelihoods. Like other rural producers of the period, they were separated from their means of production and forced to work to the rhythms and expectations of capitalist employers. These sealers worked extremely hard in sub-zero temperatures – running over heaving ice floes, hauling vessels with tow ropes through packed ice, pulling heavy pelts for miles – not just for subsistence but also to try to earn some extra income in the down season of other fisheries. They also risked their health and their lives in deplorable conditions – overcrowding, poor diet, the constant threat of ice blindness and “swile finger,” and the dangers of falling into the arctic water or being stranded on the ice for extended periods.⁹ As steam power replaced sails in the 1860s and 1870s, the requirement for increased capital caused a concentration of the industry in larger firms and ports. The greater capacity of the new steamers to bring large numbers of sealers farther into the whelping ice created further pressure on the resource, and catches decreased to levels in the 200,000s and 300,000s by the latter decades of the 19th century.¹⁰ Furthermore, owners struggled to find markets for their most important product – seal oil – as petroleum products became more readily available. Employment in the spring vessel fishery declined, and berths to the ice became increasingly competitive. And as Newfoundland’s economy suffered various recessions related to declining fisheries and generally ineffective landward development, its sealing effort was much reduced by the early 20th century.¹¹

2 The landsmen hunt maintained its important place in local sealing communities, which still utilized the entire animal and produced seal oil for local consumption and a reduced market demand.¹² By the 1950s, however, demand for the whitecoat pelt itself was increasing, not as much for its blubber as for its luxurious fur, which was finding a growing market in the fur fashion industry. Newspapers and trade papers of the period, nonetheless, indicate a diminishing presence of the Canadian sealing fleet at the Front throughout that decade and into the next, with just a handful of Nova Scotian vessels (often manned by Newfoundland sealers) in attendance that were occasionally joined by one or two Newfoundland vessels. Norway maintained a moderate-sized fleet, and the 1960s witnessed the appearance of large, well-equipped Russian sealing vessels: icebreakers with factory and refrigeration capacity and helicopters to seek out the seal herds.¹³ While a number of government scientists and several observers from humane societies began attending the hunt and expressing concerns about killing methods and the sustainability of the hunt for both adult and young seals, the main thrust of various investigations, reports, and media coverage was to reach international agreement about quotas, opening and closing dates, and maintaining the resource for the benefit of the sealing industry.¹⁴ But this conversation would change with the arrival of animal rights and animal welfare activists to protest the hunt in the mid-1960s and the 1970s.

3 The “moment” that triggered the shift from discourses about “conservation of the resource” to an international outcry against “the murder of baby seals” was the airing of a film by the CBC’s French-language television network in March 1965. Les Phoques de la Banquise, more commonly known as “the Artek film,” was first shown on German television and was quickly picked up by other networks. It contained footage of the hunt from the Magdalen Islands, Quebec, in the Gulf of St. Lawrence – including a gruesome scene of a sealer skinning a whitecoat alive and leaving it to die, screaming, on the ice. Images from the film were broadcast around the world, and an appalled international audience focused its wrath on Canadian sealers.¹⁵ Most Newfoundland sealers were also revolted by the scene, claiming that live skinning was completely against their harvesting standards. They argued that they had developed expertise in dispatching the animals by a blow to the skull with a “gaff” – a long staff with a hook that also served as a safety device, helping them to pull ice pans together to facilitate walking over the icefields or to hook themselves out of freezing water if they fell through the ice.¹⁶ Furthermore, a House of Commons inquiry into the film revealed that the offensive footage had been staged – a finding that was based on a deposition of the Quebec sealer involved that he had been paid by Artek Films to skin the seal without first killing it. At the 1966 hunt, a majority of invited observers from humane societies deemed the gaff to be more efficient and humane than techniques used in abattoirs and noted that most carcasses they had studied had presented with crushed skulls, having been “rendered completely unconscious and unable to feel pain” before skinning.¹⁷ However, the damage to the reputation of all seal harvesters had been done. In a 1966 article “The Cruel Seal Hunt,” Brian Davies (then, an observer for the New Brunswick SPCA) repeated the charge that whitecoats were being clubbed before their mothers’ eyes and skinned while still alive.¹⁸ In the following years, newly forming environmental groups, such as the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) and Greenpeace, as well as celebrities and media, descended upon whelping ices in the North Atlantic, particularly the Labrador Front, to protest what was described as a “savage” slaughter perpetrated by Newfoundland “barbarians.”¹⁹

4 Early Greenpeace activists, such as Bob Hunter, Paul Watson, Patrick Moore, and Rex Weyler, protested the hunt by creating “mind bombs” (after McLuhan) at the Front, throwing themselves between whitecoats and sealers and, at one point, putting their bodies in front of a charging sealing vessel to create images meant to “sail across an electronic sea” and “explode in people’s minds.”²⁰ Davies, founder of IFAW, shifted gears from merely observing and reporting on the hunt to “exploiting the goodwill of the international media” in order to stop the hunt altogether.²¹ In 1976, he flew three stewardesses²² out to the whelping ice to pose with the whitecoats; the stewardesses were meant to evoke feminine helplessness, echoing the plight of the young seals at the mercy of the hypermasculinity of the hunters. And situated as a foil to both was the chivalrous masculinity of the animal rights/welfare activists. Indeed, this new ecomasculinity was eroticized by some. As one of the stewardesses explained: “Basically what [Brian is] doing is sexy. Very sexy. So many women these days are bored and revolted by the traditional male thing – you know, going out in the woods and proving your manhood by killing animals – that they really get turned on by someone who saves animals.”²³ This spectacle on ice was repeated the following year, when Davies flew Yvette Mimieux to the ice and Swiss conservationist Franz Weber arrived with Brigitte Bardot.²⁴ “They lapped it up, the media,” Davies told me in a 2012 interview.²⁵ Davies knew his international audience well and was particularly good at using graphic, contrasting images in media campaigns: the whitecoat cowering from the dark-clothed sealer; the white ice covered with red blood; images of lightness and darkness; evocations of good and evil.²⁶ This mixture of female sexuality, blood, and violence in advertising and recruitment campaigns has continued to serve anti-sealing movements into the 21st century.²⁷

5 Sealers and sealing communities were initially bewildered by this gendered and eroticized display on the ice, but they also soon became angry and frustrated, as evidenced by the sharp words exchanged with activists. For the most part, however, sealers just attempted to get on with their job without resorting to physical violence. One did, though, throw a recently killed and skinned whitecoat at Bardot’s feet during a press conference; it was not Newfoundland’s proudest moment.²⁸ Many sealers on the Great Northern Peninsula carried out a non-violent, pro-sealing protest in 1976, picketing Davies’s hotel in St. Anthony and lying on the snow between the hotel and Davies’s helicopter to try to prevent him from flying out to the whelping ice.²⁹ In 1977, landsmen leaders such as Roy Pilgrim also sat down with Greenpeace members Bob Hunter and Patrick Moore and convinced them to halt Greenpeace plans to spray-dye whitecoat pelts green so as not to ruin markets for the landsmen seal hunt – a much smaller-scale effort that some Greenpeace members saw as less damaging to the herd than the large-vessel commercial hunt offshore.³⁰ The decision can also be read as a sound public relations move, as Greenpeace did not want to be seen as an elitist, urban movement ganging up on the rural working class. Yet there was compassion and compromise in this resolution as well.³¹

But by then international outrage had been fully stoked against the sealers, regardless of the nature of their sealing efforts, and vitriolic letters – missives addressed directly to, and thus targeting, individual sealers – were pouring into sealing communities on Newfoundland’s northeast coast. This discourse was saturated with images of deviant, bloodthirsty masculinity:

This outpouring of anger and hatred took Newfoundland sealers, and Newfoundlanders in general, by surprise. Newfoundlanders saw sealing as an essential part of maintaining a marine-oriented livelihood in communities that had been almost completely dependent on the sea for survival for some four centuries. Fishing families on the northeast coast, who carried out various fisheries from late spring to late fall, depended on sealing to see them through the lean winter months and to provide some income to help them “gear up” for these other fisheries. Local communities saw sealers as responsible breadwinners, even courageous to the extent that they endured highly dangerous working conditions to help their families survive. Most were respected fathers and grandfathers, caring husbands, sons, and brothers. They were responsible community members, who looked after families and neighbours. If the seal harvest generated any extra cash, the sealers’ good fortune was reflected in the collection plates of local churches in the late spring.

6 But after intensive lobbying by IFAW and Greenpeace, the European Economic Community banned the import of products derived from whitecoats in 1983, and it and its successor, the European Union, have continued the prohibition ever since. Although sealers and the Canadian and Newfoundland governments attempted to negotiate with activists in meetings and in the media, discussions ended in a further entrenchment of positions. In the following years, IFAW led a wide-scale boycott of all Canadian fish products, forcing the Canadian government to ban the offshore hunting of whitecoats and bluebacks (newborn hood seals) in Canadian waters in 1987. These measures brought the larger commercial hunt to its knees, making it an unprofitable venture for sealing vessels and companies operating within the Canadian regulatory regime.³⁶ Newfoundland landsmen had actually been supporting the moratorium on whitecoats and bluebacks since 1982.³⁷ The fallout from these anti-sealing campaigns, nonetheless, had devastating effects on both the landsman hunt and the Inuit seal hunt. Still, the Newfoundland landsman hunt continued to employ some 5,000 men in the 1980s, harvesting juvenile, bedlamer, and adult seals on the ice close to their communities either on foot or from with small vessels – motorboats, 35 feet and under, and longliners, 65 feet and under. By 2016 the number of commercial sealing license holders in Canada had increased to 9,710, but only about 1,000 of them were active.³⁸ Yet the reduction in the number of landsmen had nothing to do with a decrease in seal herds but rather reflected a declining demand in world markets that remained convinced that newborn seals were still being harvested, despite 30-year-old bans. In particular, the condemnation of the “cruelty” of the hunt persisted, even though Canada implemented a three-step killing process that had been recommended by an independent, international group of veterinarians and approved by the EU’s Food Safety Authority as effective in killing seals “without causing avoidable pain, distress, fear, and other forms of suffering.”³⁹ Canada’s Marine Mammals Regulations were amended in 2009 to implement these three stages: 1) shooting the animal or striking the animal (with a hakapik or club) on the top of the cranium; 2) checking or palpating the skull to ensure that is crushed; and 3) bleeding the animal by severing two auxiliary arteries beneath the front flippers for at least one minute.⁴⁰ Yet animal rights activists have represented these efforts as even more barbaric, portraying sealers as frenzied by blood-lust – no longer content to just shoot the animals, but rushing onto the ice to club them and slit their throats.⁴¹

7 Nonetheless, these working-class sealers have continued to struggle to position themselves as responsible and ethical harvesters. In exploring these efforts, it is important to listen to the life stories of Newfoundland landsmen and to attend not only to rationality of argument but also to affect – the feelings and emotions they reveal – in order to problematize facile representations of “club-wielding, gun-toting” hypermasculinity.

8 Clearly, the landsmen distance themselves from this image. They also dissociate themselves from the cultural misrepresentation of the “jolly ice hunters” – the rakish, happy-go-lucky adventurers that had been created by middle-class discourse in Newfoundland and Britain to encourage working-class sealers to take part in the large-vessel offshore hunt.⁴² Most of them feel apprehension and fear of the very real dangers that they encounter. And while they appreciate the comradeship of other sealers, they do not use the hunt to escape into a homosocial idyll. Most have usually felt the tug of home and family while they were away, especially in difficult weather and ice conditions. Take the sentiments of a first-time sealer, trapped on the ice in a snow “dwigh” (sudden squall), who sadly noted to a fellow sealer: “You know, John . . . they’ll be all home with mother, tonight . . . . They’ll be all home with mother but me.”⁴³ They have certainly not been hunting for sport or trophies, or seeking a sense of manhood that had been lost in the process of urbanization and industrialization.⁴⁴ Most have found the killing of an animal, especially a very appealing young animal, difficult. Even the most experienced sealers say that they do not enjoy the killing and that they never really get used to the red blood smeared across the white ice, but that they do it as humanely as possible because sealing is essential to surviving in their coastal communities. They most certainly do not see their environment as a playground for hypermasculine recreation, but rather as a space that must be respected – both physically and spiritually. John Gillett, a landsman from Durrell, articulates that sense of unworldly connection in a reminiscence about a recent voyage in his longliner (a fishing vessel equipped with a long line from which multiple baited hooks are attached):

Like other landsmen, Gillett realizes that he is part of systems, both worldly and transcendent, that extend well beyond his own concerns and experiences.

9 These landsmen also acknowledge that the large commercial hunt in the 19th and early 20th centuries was destroying the harp seal population and could not have been sustained. But the sealers point out that they were also trapped in the maw of industrial capitalism: they were not driven by hunger for profit but by the need to survive through a hunt that had moved beyond their control. It is unfortunate, then, if not rather disingenuous on the part of protesters, that the sealers themselves became and continue to be the target of the brunt of international anger. They, too, recognize the immorality of that large-scale, capitalist effort offshore, which separated them “from the sea and the topsoil that feeds us.” Some of my older narrators participated very occasionally in the offshore hunt, out of economic necessity, when they were younger. As a result, one observed, they were “forced to do things to satisfy the market, and that’s very destructive to the food that’s feeding us.”⁴⁶ But those whose families have been primarily involved in the landsman hunt for generations argue that they have always been good stewards of the environment: “Our [landsmen] forefathers . . . had more insight and were more conservation-minded than what the protesters are now, because they only took what they needed” – tens of seals, not thousands – to provide for their families and other community members.⁴⁷ Although landsmen catches increased during the 20th century with the adoption of motorboats and then longliners, this hunt has remained primarily a landward effort that has been enmeshed in year-long fishing activities.⁴⁸ Sealing was just something that coastal communities did as part of “the rhythm of the seasons,” sealers explain.⁴⁹ It heralded the start of the fishing year, and the income helped fishers prepare for other fisheries: herring, then capelin, followed by groundfish such as cod, turbot, and flounder (and since the 1990s crab and shrimp have also become important species in the fishing cycle along the northeast coast). The intrinsic logic of pursuing these interlocking activities to survive in rural communities along the northeast coast seems lost on those critics who argue that sealing produces only a portion of sealers’ incomes. Jack Troake, a sealing skipper descended from a long line of swilers (sealers) in Twillingate, describes the vulnerability of coastal people’s livelihoods and the havoc that can be wrought when any part of that cycle of survival starts unraveling:

10 This is not to say that sealers demand the right to hunt regardless of its impact on the environment. But they feel that they have developed a better sense than most outside “experts” of what is happening in the natural world because they are completely immersed in it. In many ways, their understanding of their place in the ecosystem is very like that of Inuit sealers. It is also traditional, local knowledge that deserves acknowledgement and respect.⁵¹

11 Landsmen and sealing communities have increasingly presented themselves as conservationists who are keenly attuned to the needs of the environment. “We’re on the ocean,” one told me. “We see what’s going on . . . . We know what to look for.”⁵² These sealers feel that they are far more in tune with nature than scientists and “urbanites” who are too removed from the realities of living in a coastal environment to appreciate fully the interconnectedness of all species. And they argue that they come from a cultural tradition that has always respected the ocean: an understanding that “you should use it wisely, and if you use it wisely, it will always be there.”⁵³ Sealers see themselves as very much part of the ecosystem – just one of the species that is part of maintaining a balance. “Life depends on life,” Allan Richards told me. “There’s no way out. Fish eat smaller fish, and smaller fish depend on an insect . . . . If I’m going to live, an animal must die.”⁵⁴ Animal rights activists might take issue with this line of argument, but it does reflect the limited options for proper nutrition in northern communities on the island. Ray Elliott compared himself to the polar bear. “We were all predators,” he observed; yet predators have their place in the system as well.⁵⁵ Sealers wonder, then, why they are not seen as a part of the ecosystem that is worth saving – why a sustainable landsman hunt is seen as out of place and why their local traditions and knowledge, their need to maintain a marine-based livelihood, are so devalued.

12 Sealers, meanwhile, have experienced the devastation of rural communities wrought by poorly managed marine harvesting, dictated by scientists and politicians far removed from the outcomes of the quotas and regulations that they have imposed. By the early 1980s sealers were worried not only about lost sealing income but about the effect that increasing herds would have on the seals’ prey, such as cod and capelin. The worst of many fishers’ fears seemed to be realized when, in the face of drastically declining stocks, the Canadian government called a moratorium on harvesting northern cod in 1992, adding other groundfish species the following year.⁵⁶ Although Newfoundland fishers acknowledged that overfishing offshore (both Canadian and international) was part of the problem, common sense told them that allowing larger fish-eating mammal populations to increase dramatically was also wreaking havoc with smaller species in the food chain. “Nature is crying out,” one landsman told me. “The resources of the sea are no longer in balance.”⁵⁷ Another argued that sealers have always “respected the role of the seal in the environment,” but that the privileging of this species above others would ultimately require a seal cull if groundfish in Newfoundland waters were to be saved.⁵⁸ A return to equilibrium was needed.⁵⁹

13 Scientists offered evidence on both sides of the debates about increasing seal quotas and actual culls. DFO and FRCC studies in the late 1980s and early 1990s, for example, revealed that the population of harp seals off Newfoundland and Labrador’s coast had “ballooned” to some three million animals and were having “catastrophic” effects on fish stocks, including the northern cod. Animal rights experts countered that cod made up only about 1 per cent of the seals’ diet, so that their impact on cod stocks was negligible. Dr. Leslie Harris, of Memorial University, pointed out that, even at this very conservative estimate, basic arithmetic revealed that seals might be consuming at least 50,0000 tonnes of northern cod per year, with a more likely estimate being 100,000 tonnes. He also argued that capelin, an essential food of the northern cod, comprised 25 percent of the seals’ diet.⁶⁰

14 Newfoundland fishers and sealers, already cynical about “objective” research that undergirded such varying opinions, had other compelling evidence to consider. Fishers were observing seals with voracious appetites (perhaps victims of their own unsustainable numbers) becoming tangled in fishing gear in search of prey, coming deep into bays, and crawling up into the woods for food. Videos surfaced of seals charging fishing nets, trapping and eating cod in a cove in Bonavista Bay, biting livers out of cod and leaving the gutted fish along the ocean floor.⁶¹ In June 1999, the House of Commons fisheries committee recommended that the seal herd be cut in half.⁶² Even the Canadian Nature Federation approved a limited cull to protect prey species, provided that the impact on seal numbers be monitored and that no federal subsidies be offered to provide any form of incentive.⁶³

15 Interestingly, amidst calls by politicians, sealing companies, and many fishers to increase seal quotas and even to revive the larger offshore seal hunt, some of the province’s most respected landsmen provided a voice of sober second thought about re-introducing such an intensive sealing effort. Harold Small of Wild Cove, president of the Northeast Coast Sealers Co-operative, warned against “killing seals just because they’re out there.” If anything, he noted, the re-instatement of an offshore hunt would set back the careful efforts of the landsmen to create markets for adult seals. He also warned against making the seal the scapegoat for the declining cod fishery – “trying to cover up the wrongs the deep sea fishing fleet have committed in destroying our fish stocks.”⁶⁴ In 1994, Mark Small of Wild Cove, landsman and president of the Canadian Sealers Association, questioned whether the seal population was growing as dramatically as some were indicating, and he particularly warned against permitting non-professional sealers on the ice to harvest seals – a decision that would result in an inhumane hunt.⁶⁵ Wilf Aylward of St. Anthony cautioned discretion until a DFO survey established more exact numbers: “I don’t think we should go out and slaughter seals just for the sake of getting rid of them.”⁶⁶ Jack Troake of Twillingate agreed: “It’s not the seals’ fault that there’s not enough fish for us and them,” he told a journalist from Ottawa.⁶⁷ These sealers were stressing several key themes of landsman discourse shaped in conversation with the evolving nature of the ecosystem they were part of: seal harvesting must be sustainable, the hunt must be professional and humane, and the seal is not the enemy of coastal communities.

16 These sealers have continued their efforts to set standards in the industry and ensure that they are being met by all practitioners. In the past three decades, they have worked on creating a professional group of qualified sealing specialists: ensuring that killing methods are humane, committing fully to a more sustainable landsman hunt, training in new technologies such as radar on board small boats, observing regulations around seal harvesting licenses, and forming the Canadian Sealers’ Association (in 1982) to oversee the landsman effort and lobby on its behalf.⁶⁸ One of my narrators, a landsman who had occasionally worked in the offshore hunt, even credited this transition in part to encounters with anti-sealing protestors in the late 20th century:

Those few who fail to meet these standards are seen by other landsmen as “amateurs” and “yahoos” – a disgrace to the industry.⁷⁰ While regulations and penalties can also be a deterrent to inhumane killings, they can be circumvented in small outharbours. Yet there is also a strong cultural ethic among landsmen to carry out their work proficiently and humanely. In 2016, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans observed that in some 3,000 inspections carried out over the previous five years by DFO’s fishery officers, 96 per cent of Canadian sealers had been in compliance with the Canadian Marine Mammals Regulations.⁷¹

17 So sealers feel that they have been betrayed by many animal rights activists who have not only failed to recognize non-Indigenous human populations as part of the ecosystem but have continued to deploy the discourse of an “inhumane” hunt to create huge war chests for other causes, leaving the sealers with no other way to supplement their livelihoods in areas that have few or no alternative work opportunities. Executive Director Kenneth Brynaert of the Canadian Wildlife Federation warned in 1987 that animal rights activism could potentially “destroy the traditional lifestyles of Canadians whose livelihood depends on wildlife resources.” Neither conservation nor humane killing principles were at stake in the hunt, he observed, but the highly emotional campaign run by the animal rights movement had blurred in the public mind “the distinction between animal rights and conservation.”⁷² The conflation of conservationist hunting with cruelty and “savagery” has continued into the 21st century. As a result, activists have bred a disdain for working-class harvesters and a callous disregard for disrupting local economies and ways of life. The very real consequences of that contempt have been the devastation of fishing communities and the rural depopulation of the province.

18 And perhaps this is now the landsmen’s biggest fear. I have heard landsmen talk about extremely difficult voyages – getting lost in snowstorms, walking for miles in blizzards to reach safety, losing boats and pelts and lives – with a tremendous amount of stoicism, even fatalism, that are also articulations of an older sealing masculinity. But the potential death of sealing and fishing communities provokes profound emotions among the sealers: anxiety about their livelihoods, despair about the loss of a coastal way of life that stretches back for centuries, and heartbreak at the sight of young people heading out over the highway to the mainland with all their belongings packed in U-Haul trailers.

19 Mark Small talks about his own feelings of distress and frustration in trying to fight larger, wealthier forces that have continued to attack the small-scale landsman hunt:

20 Yet Small and other landsmen have remained in the industry. Juvenile and adult seal pelts are still used for local clothing and boots, meat is still being bottled for local consumption, and flipper pie is a very welcome and nutritious addition to the local diet in the spring. But it has also become imperative for these landsmen to find new markets, develop new products, and market themselves as responsible coastal harvesters. As did their ancestors, they have continued to make efforts to utilize the full animal, albeit with a modern twist: producing canned seal meat, seal sausages, and pepperoni for broader consumption; manufacturing seal oil capsules as health supplements; and processing organs such as heart and liver as specialty food items, by-products for poultry food, and adult seal pelts for a wider clothing market. In some cases, they have coordinated their efforts. On the Baie Verte Peninsula, for example, a cluster of plants have developed over the past three decades to share the same catches: one, processing pelts; another, canning seal meat; a third, making seal oil capsules. But the landsmen know that they have an uphill climb as environmentalist and animal rights groups continue to batter away at their modest efforts, still using the whitecoat – not hunted since the late 1980s – as their poster child.⁷⁴

21 Small once described the tightrope on which landsmen were balanced as he spoke before the Royal Commission on Sealing in 1985:

What animal rights activists heard in this moment was anthropocentric arrogance. But it was much more a cri de coeur, rooted in a conservationist masculinity shared by landsmen who wanted to maintain a sustainable inshore hunt – and thereby, rural communities – along the northeast coast of Newfoundland. These sealers and fishers continue to walk that tightrope today.

22 The question remains as to why their environmental ethos has never been embraced by a more broadly framed ecomasculinity. Individuals and families in these communities have harvested seals in small boats since the 17th century, taking seals as they came close to land in a process that differs quite profoundly from the rapacious, large-vessel, capitalist ventures of the 19th and 20th centuries. Landsmen have agreed with activists that the large-vessel, offshore hunt was destructive. They have changed their killing methods (although they still maintain that the original gaff is the most humane) and made efforts to professionalize their industry. They have treated the environment with respect and a strong appreciation of the need for balance among all species, including themselves. Still, they continue to find themselves sidelined by anti-sealing rhetoric that represents them as “savages” and “barbarians.”⁷⁶

23 There are also overtones of racism in these terms that are both complex and disturbing. Historically, their meanings have been constructed within various contexts of colonialism to reference the subaltern other, and their usage is thereby highly problematic. Ironically, these terms would never be applied in today’s world to Inuit sealers – at least, not without considerable public outcry. In order to sidestep the awkwardness of this exemption, environmentalists have subconsciously or deliberately fallen back on another Eurocentric trope, the “noble savage” – primitive, ignorant, immersed in nature, and incapable of harming the environment, to make allowance for Indigenous hunts. This decision has sometimes been quite pragmatic: Brian Davies, for example, told me that he did not agree with the Inuit hunt, but that it would have been “impolitic” to protest it.⁷⁷ Other animal rights activists have diluted their arguments against Inuit seal hunting to focus their critique on non-Indigenous hunting. Both Greenpeace and IFAW, for example, have apologized for the impact of their anti-sealing campaigns on Inuit communities; although they have been reluctant to condone Inuit sealing for profit, they have not targeted it for a long time.⁷⁸ PETA has only recently begun to soften its critique of the subsistence Inuit hunt, but still does not condone their small-scale commercial hunting.⁷⁹ Throughout this ethical equivocation, however, Newfoundland sealers have been continuously positioned as “degraded” white men who have failed to meet the standards of respectable white masculinity in the “civilized” Global North (“But whoever said that Newfoundland was a ‘civilized society?’”). Landsmen’s local knowledge and long-held traditions have been framed as an embarrassment. The critically depressed economy in their region and their attachment to their homes and way of life do not count in mitigation. This is not to underplay the devastation that has been wrought in Inuit communities by declining markets for seal products as a result of animal rights pressure – and for full transparency, I support the Inuit hunt – but rather to try to understand why different standards have applied to the two groups at a “moral” level.⁸⁰

24 Ethnic and regional marginalization has also been clearly in play in the targeting of Newfoundland landsmen. In a region that has long been disadvantaged by federal policy decisions that have privileged the central provinces, Newfoundland and Labrador has been seen as the poorest cousin of Confederation, until it became a “have province” in 2008 as a result of a very short-lived boom in the energy sector.⁸¹ In the late 20th century, the lazy, ignorant, feckless “Newfie” was an easy scapegoat for activists, who tapped into much broader stereotypes of ethnic others as ignorant, brutish thugs. Classism has also been rife in this context. An opinion often articulated among anti-sealing protestors is that Newfoundland sealers should “just find something else to do.” At best, this attitude has demonstrated tremendous naivety about the potential for people to sustain themselves in rural communities when a way of life unravels. Simplistic solutions were in ample evidence in the early days of the protests, when activists suggested brushing whitecoats for their fur or bringing eco-tourists to the whelping ice to engage with the seals – ideas that would have put both human and non-human creatures in danger. But there was something elitist in this opinion as well – a whiff of “let them eat brioche.” In the past several decades suggestions have been made that the Canadian government buy out sealing licenses, but no viable alternatives for economic survival have been forthcoming from the animal rights lobby. Sealing/fishing communities will simply have to pack up their homes and move to larger cities, where they will become part of the ghettoized, unskilled working poor. Or they can stay put and go on welfare or starve to death in the dark.

25 But to see Newfoundland landsmen and ecomasculinist activists as polar opposites is also to oversimplify the context. These two groups do share some values in relation to the natural world, so is it possible for them to have a less-heated conversation about those areas of agreement? A recent article by ecomasculinity theorist Bob Pease inadvertently outlines some bases for actual negotiation. He argues that men must acknowledge their “embeddedness in nature” and cease viewing nature as a commodity over which humans can exercise complete control. “It is our vulnerability and our corporeal connection to the material world,” he observes, “that fosters an ethic of care for the environment.” He encourages men to open themselves up to “greater emotional and physical vulnerability in response to nature” and to articulate the “rage, grief, fear, and despair about the environmental challenges we face.”⁸² It can be argued that landsmen sealers are already embodying many of Pease’s recommendations.

26 The greatest impediment to a conversation between the two groups seems obvious: landsmen kill seals for survival, while ecomasculinity abjures the killing of non-human creatures by non-Indigenous humans. But the latter stance fails to recognize the cultural importance of fish and wild game in the diet of rural Newfoundlanders as well as the expense and carbon footprint of importing food (by container ship, ferry, and truck) to maintain a healthy vegan or vegetarian diet in a colder climate.⁸³ Ecomasculinity, as a theory and practice, also tends not to interrogate the variety of circumstances – based on multiple systems of oppression such as class, race, sexuality, region, and age – that complicate the lives of men across time, place, and culture. It situates itself as an idealized alternative to hegemonic masculinity of the Global North, but it errs in conceptualizing hegemonic masculinity by clumping together all industrial/breadwinner masculinities – regardless of class and other systems of difference – as the most toxic, “obscene” form of dominance on earth⁸⁴ while overlooking the vast differences in experience encompassed by such a crudely rendered category. Ecomasculinity claims to be non-essentialist in its thinking, yet it still delegates men, women, racialized others, and other-thanhuman others into categories that are seen as neatly defined; it does not aspire to move beyond systems of gender, race, class, and so on as historical artifacts that forward thinkers should try to deconstruct. And while ecomasculinity wants to challenge hegemonic masculinity, it is underpinned by the assumption that it is middle-class and elite (primarily white) Western men who must be taught to care for and liberate all creatures of the earth because this privileged group are the most significant historical agents in creating effective change.⁸⁵ Ultimately, ecomasculinity founders on its own paternalism, rigidity, and lack of reflexivity.

27 If practitioners and theorists of ecomasculinity want to avoid charges of elitism and exclusion, it might be time for them to try to understand people whose experiences are grounded in a harsher world. There is a precedent in the sealing and anti-sealing campaigns of the late 20th century. In 1977, when people were lining up behind two extreme positions about the seal hunt, Bob Hunter and Patrick Moore of Greenpeace sat down with Newfoundland sealers and found a way to compromise on the conservationist, sustainable landsmen hunt. In the present context, it is time once again for ecomasculinity to check its entitlement and find some compassion for all the creatures – human as well as nonhuman – of the land and sea.