Cyclonic Development in Newfoundland’s Seal Hunt

Abstract

In the interwar years, especially the 1930s, Newfoundland’s largest seal fishery companies began directing seal hunters to kill very young harp seals for their furry whitecoats. St. John’s was drawn into a cyclonic development transforming the global seal hunt to support international fur markets. Though this cyclonic development went largely unnoticed by contemporaries, the “fast fur hunt” created new relationships between St. John’s merchants and metropolitan fur dealers and dressers, challenged the sustainability of the harp seal populations in unexpected ways, undermined labour relations between sealers and seal fishery companies, and, before WWII, began transforming Newfoundland’s seal whelping grounds into a competitive international “commons.” The seal hunt was reconfigured enough during the 1930s that, after World War II, it converted very quickly and largely into a fur hunt. By the 1960s, that hunt raised real fears for the sustainability of harp seal populations in the Western North Atlantic, and by the 1970s, the killing of days-old pup seals for their fur exposed the entire industry to the devastating criticism of the anti-seal hunt protest, from which the seal fishery has never really recovered.