Seals, Stigma and Survival

On November 4^th, 2025 “Seals, Stigma and Survival” secondary investigator Jim Winter conducted an interview with retired Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO) scientist Dr. Garry Stenson. Winter, a previous employee of DFO, was once Stenson’s colleague and together they discuss Stenson’s decades of work for the Canadian government leading seal research off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador and working with national and international partners on seal-focused research. In the following two-part interview, Stenson and Winter discuss the range of factors impacting the perception and health of seal populations off the coast of Canada and beyond. Stenson also reflects on his work aiding the Canadian and Norwegian case at the World Trade Organisation challenging the European Union’s ban on seal product imports and the factors that appear to impact contemporary European approaches to understanding humane hunting and the morality of hunting seals.

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Jim Winter: Just to start please give people a sketch, a nice outline of sort of your life in science, your career, that kind of thing, the highlights.

Garry Stenson: Well, I did an undergraduate in zoology at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. When I finished that, I went and did a PhD at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, where I worked on coastal dwelling river otters, specifically reproductive physiology and life history strategies. And then I was hired by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans [Canada] as a research scientist [starting at the level of] research scientist 1, and I stayed there for just under 38 years. So I was hired in 1985 and I was there and I retired in July 2022. During that time I went from a research scientist 1 to a research scientist 5, which is as high as you can go in that time period. So when I retired, I was considered a senior research scientist. From 1990 onward, I was the head of the marine mammal section in science branch here in St. John’s, Newfoundland, and I kept that position until 2021 when I stepped back for the last year before my retirement. So during that time I was responsible for research on all marine mammals in the Newfoundland region and generally worked throughout the North Atlantic. Most of my research was primarily on ice breeding seals, so harp seals, hooded seals, grey seals. I participated in harp, hooded and gray seal population assessments, ecology, ecosystem patterns, impacts of climate change, you name it, we did it. So reproduction, physiology, little bit of everything. I worked with a lot of different colleagues, both across Canada and globally, particularly the North Atlantic. I did a lot of work with colleagues in Greenland, Norway, Denmark, and Russia. So I was involved in all of those over the years with a wide variety of projects. I’ve published over 200 science articles having to do with marine mammals.

Winter: That pretty well covers it, I think. The focus from point of view of what we’re looking at here would be the time you spent with seals, which was an inordinate amount of time. You spent most of your time on seals with the research that you did. You’re at the front level, you’re doing the basic research to provide information to the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, but where did it go once you had completed it? What happened to it?

                                                                          
Stenson: Well, the way the process works is that science is one of the inputs into the overall management decisions that are being made. First, from a science point of view, the way it works with us is we do research on a particular topic. Some of those topics are given to us, for the most part for the seal research it’s generally been projects that we felt were the most important to help address questions that Canadians would have because that’s what our job is, is to be able to answer questions that the people of Canada might be asking. So we would do that research. We would do the data collection, like plan to get the funding for it, do the data collection, do the write up of the results after we’ve analyzed the data, then that would go to a peer review. Within the science group in the early days when I first started, that would go to a group called CAFSAC, Canadian Atlantic Fisheries Seal Advisory Committee.

Then after CAFSAC was dismantled by John Crosby, I think that’s who dismantled it in the 1990s, we then created a National Marine Mammal Peer Review Committee and this consisted of all of the marine mammal people within DFO as well as outside experts on particular topics. We would meet once or twice a year, depend on what was on our schedules and we would go through a peer review process there, review the analysis, review the data, and review the conclusions and decide to modify or accept as need be. Then the results more recently from the very beginning they would either go from into a CAFSAC document or now it’s a Canadian Science Advisory Secretariat (CSAS) document. It usually would have two if you got a request for advice from the minister’s office well or from the department. Then you would create what’s called a science advisory report, which would be a summary, and it could use results from a number of different studies put together to address a question. And then you would write up an individual research document for each of those parts. That would go together and get summarized. The idea of a stock status report would be that it would be something that would be relatively clearly written, easy to digest summary, sort of like an executive summary so for an example would be if we were to do an assessment and provide harvest advice. The harvest advice would be based upon a management objective that’s been set by fisheries management. The science would incorporate, say, for harp seals, for example, we would use, or any of the seals we would use a pup production estimate, knowledge about catches with it, what’s reported catches, what’s reported bycatch, and what we’ve collected for data on reproductive rates.

And then it would vary with years and as we’ve gotten better, we’d include say environmental impacts or whatever and then build a population model. The model would be the one that would provide you with the population trajectories and then based upon the management objectives estimate what a recommended quota or total allowable catch would be that meets those objectives.

Winter: So the advice would be based on the questions that were coming from the DFO management?

Stenson: In terms of the management objective, yes.

Winter: OK, so you would do the raw science and provide the numbers, but how the science ended up getting used was not the role of the scientists.

Stenson: Well, once we’ve done, the science advisory report goes to the managers as well as up the science chain. So the science chain would have that information, the managers would have that information. Then it’s again varied over the years, probably for a lot of the time what would happen is that fisheries management, they’re responsible for providing the advice to the minister, they would bring together the science advice, other input that may have from the from the industry or from international or the fishers, and the regional fisheries managers.  We used to actually get together on a regular basis and go over all the different components.

Those of us in science, we would also present that information to the meetings of, say, the Seal Advisory Committee, which was industry representatives, and so it would all go to the managers. The managers would then make a recommendation to the minister. That recommendation sometimes we would see before it goes some and more recently we haven’t.
But it would normally include within that memo that goes to the minister, it would include a summary of the science advice and then whatever else the fisheries managers felt was important.

Winter: So the science is one component and your role would be to provide the most accurate science you could. And in that capacity, was the department providing you with adequate, not you personally necessarily, but the system, the scientists like yourself, with adequate funding and back up to be able to do the research that gave you the results that you felt you needed? In other words, were you able to conduct enough research to provide accurate or what you felt was the most accurate results?

Stenson: I’d say that we provided the most accurate results possible, but often in spite of funding from the department rather than with it funding. I’ll speak here about in Newfoundland… in terms of the Newfoundland region, when I first started back in 1985, we had minimal funding. That was then we would get special projects every once in a while.

Things like the Northern Cod Science Program that would give us funding for surveys after that. The surveys would generally be funded by Ottawa on a four to five year basis. We would find the funding, they would find the funding through them, but the ongoing annual funding that was required for the reproductive data, for all of the other things that you need, age structures, these sorts of things that go into it, generally we were trying to find funding for that through other sources.

Every so often we would get a bit of money for a special project and that’s like the Atlantic Seal Research Program, or the Northern Cod Science Program we would be funded for a couple of years, but ongoing annual support, what we would call a base funding, it’s been totally cut. It has been cut since about 1990; it has not been adequate and now it is basically non-existent. We would get funding primarily by taking it from other projects that didn’t use it and the advantage we had of course was that a lot of the seal work, the harp seal, the hooded seal work and gray seal work was in the last quarter of the year. So, we would in some years get hindered that way because when they put in a freeze on federal government funding, especially in the 90s. we would then have to argue to get our monies released if we had money froze. But on the other hand, at times we were able to take advantage of that because it was year-end and if there was money left over then we could use it.

Generally the funding for the annual monitoring, which is really critical and has been a key to the assessments, that is not, has not been, around for 30 years and so no, it it’s not adequately funded.

Winter: Was the up and down in the funding anything to do the external objectives of the management side in relation to what was going on in sealing, not just the pure science. Did you see any correlation the amount of money available being influenced that way or would that have nothing to do with anything?

Stenson: Well, to be honest, a lot of the funding we got was because seals eat fish, eat cod. The department is, especially in the Newfoundland region, it’s a ground fish department. And nowadays it’s ground fish and shellfish or other projects that get put on the side burner in order to fund those sorts of things. So even when the Northern Cod Science program in the early 90s came about, we got a lot of money through that but one of the conditions was that it didn’t affect our ongoing base funding. For the other groups that got funding, it didn’t at the end of it, their base was the same, but our base was always less. It had been cut and as my director told me said, the reason is he knew we could find funds elsewhere.

So…I would say that the science that got carried out on seals in Atlantic Canada was mostly because of individual scientists who were very good at figuring out ways of finding funding for projects whether it meant taking money from other projects that weren’t using that money, or whether it was taking advantage of work with others. So, for example, some of the work we would do would be with fisheries officers helping us out or we would get Conservation and Protection Branch would be involved in in a project.

When we could, we would be able to piggyback on these kinds of things and then we’d get, I mean we’d get spots of individual money that would come in, but it was usually after a fair bit of finagling to get the projects, they were often related to the department’s concern about the impact of predation.

Winter: The impact of predation has been a big discussion point on all sides of the issue, both in the scientific and from the fisheries industry point of view and so on. There appears to be wide variances on how much predation harp seals, in particular,  eat because they’re the largest volume. Is there any particular reason why you think that there is such a wide variation on interpretation of seal predation?

Stenson: Now you’re asking me a good question here. There is data and there are impressions. We have the data. The data tells us one thing, but to be perfectly honest, a lot of people just don’t believe it. Nowadays we see things going on in in other countries where people are starting to accept this concept of ‘alternate facts’ . People just don’t really care what the facts say and that’s been a situation with the seal situation for a long time. Let me finish in the two ways.

There wasn’t a lot of information around when the cod collapsed, but there was virtually no data on cod in terms of ecology. There was some data on seals and we know seals are predators and generally all through history, predators are often targeted whenever there’s a decline n a prey population. We had data at the time that said harp seals eat cod and that was enough. But even then people were unbelieving. I mean, I had a lot of people come up to me and say, “Oh well, you know, harp seals eat cod”. And I go, “well, yeah, I know, I’ve actually estimated the amount of cod they eat”. “Oh, but harp seals eat cod. And you guys are ignoring that”. So there’s this, perception that as a predator they must be having an impact as an abundant predator. But the difference between consumption and impact has always been a hard one to explain.

Also, I think that there are other things going on. Partly, I suspect, I don’t know this for sure, but I suspect that all of this is happening around the same time that a lot of fishermen who were also sealers and they were being impeded from hunting, from sealing. And there was this perception, and I don’t mean that it’s not correct perception, but that if we were hunting, we would be keeping populations down. You have stopped us from hunting and the cod have gone down and you see that and I think sometimes in the back of their mind these would come out that you didn’t allow us to do something and this is the result of it.

So I think that there’s a sort of this linking of those thoughts going on at the same time. So I’m not sure that the concern, although you know, as you say everywhere you go, look, they talk about people upset about the impacts of wolves, the impacts of coyotes now in Newfoundland, so predators have always been ones that people have worried about.

Add to that that we had this situation just a few years before where there was a major hunt that’s now being stopped and I think that also plays into it. Then you also think about it from the point of view of fishermen. They’ve been told for decades and decades that their fishing is driving the fish numbers and now they’re not fishing. So what else is driving it? The concept of ecological interactions, the impact of climate, impact of changes in capelin numbers, these sorts of things. That was never part of the discussion previously.

For many, many years, the fish scientists were always saying to fishermen you’re the ones who are driving these numbers. So it’s logical, in my mind at least, it would be logical for somebody to go, well, we’re not taking it, but these predators are taking it, so therefore they must be driving the numbers if you look at that seals as just another fleet in a role of the fisheries fleet, and since they’ve been told for years that the fisheries fleet is the thing controlling numbers, well obviously seals must be controlling the numbers now. So, I think there’s a lot of different aspects that have all gotten into play in this.

Winter: agree with like you’re saying and I think that’s a very good explanation, but there is data that, you know, some scientists are saying the consumption is X per animal per annum and others are saying, oh no it’s three times that. And that just tends to confuse the issue in the minds of those who, as you point out, are saying, hang on, it’s not us that did it, so there must be serious confusion. The data gets very confusing for people who are not dealing with it daily like yourself, so in your opinion, would that have some bearing on the reluctance of people to accept a lot of the science that’s been put in front of them?

Stenson: To some extent, yes, I agree with you there. The difficulty is the way science works and it is part of the difficulty in a lot of the data that suggests, like as you said, the example you said is consumption is three times what other estimates are. A lot of those earlier estimates are early,  they were done early along but were discounted along the way. I think for the most part when it comes to people that actually look at the data, they’re not that far apart anymore and a lot of those earlier studies were discounted for whatever reason or had been changed or have been refined. But I think you find that for people generally the whole concept of science re-evaluating itself is something that a lot of non-science people have a hard time understanding. But also it’s just very easy when you have a selection to pick and choose as you want. And so we’ve got this other data there, and yeah, it was done years ago but it says what we want.

Winter: But the confusing issues are, as you say, if science doesn’t have the luxury to keep improving or looking back on what they did, you can’t really internally as a scientist change things along. But on the other hand, the people that you’re dealing with would look at it and say the recent drop idea for management from 8 million to 4.6 million seals or whatever it was, people on the outside look and say, well, what is this? I know what they were doing and now they’re telling us this. Does that complicate the issue?

Stenson: Yeah, we’ve had that problem all the way along as new data comes. The way science works is that as new data comes, as new approaches are developed, things can change; a lot like the most recent assessment, for example on harp seals was a new approach that allowed you to estimate juvenile mortality or juvenile survival. We’ve always known that juvenile survival is one of the key aspects to any population model, but it’s one of the most difficult things to estimate. So that’s actually why we put in all the effort to try and develop that approach, and do it. What it does is it changes your view of the world so you’ve got a couple of things going on. You’ve got new data coming in all the time and that are going to drive things. You’ve got new approaches coming in that may do a hopefully better job of understanding how things are influencing those numbers. But what people who are not involved in science generally come back with is the final number, and that final number’s changed. Therefore, you can go through all of the explanations of why it changed, what what’s driving it, what our improved understanding may be, but it doesn’t matter.

The final number changed so the reaction is that we obviously don’t know what we’re talking about. I mean…one of the things we would always say is you accept the fact that the weatherman may be wrong for his prediction for tomorrow but you expect somebody to be able to predict the population 5 or 10 years down the line in a biological system, why?

Winter: Do you think that the volatility surrounding seal hunting in general and in Canada in particular, do you think the volatility around that has made the polarization between what the scientists operating for to come up with their data are doing and the people that are affected by that volatility see coming out of the science?

Stenson: I agree with you. And the thing about it is, and this is where it was hard particularly as a scientist…that’s what science is, you don’t argue over the facts, you argue over the interpretation, usually. What is supposed to stay outside of science, and I say supposed to because there’s always times it doesn’t, is emotion. The whole issue of sealing, predation, humane killing, all of that, it’s all emotion; it’s primarily people dealing with their emotions.

Rather than facts per se. One of the things that I did was I was involved in the response to the European Union ban. I spent a lot of trips going over to Europe, talking to the Canadian consuls. They were having meetings at the different embassies, meeting with people from Europe, politicians, civil servants, media. I don’t know how many interviews I did; easily in the hundreds over how you deal with what’s going on with the Canadian seal hunt. I was a member of a working group that was set up by the European Food Safety Agency to look at the humaneness of killing. And so I was involved in that one as well. And one thing that came out very clear from that was we weren’t talking science for the most part, we were talking emotion.

I remember going to talk to this one EU MP from Scotland who said to me, look, I have absolutely no question that what you’re telling us is right. I mean our argument was why can’t someone hunt seal if it’s biologically sustainable, well managed and humanely done under those criteria hunting. Why is hunting seals any different than hunting a deer or whatever?
He said I agree with you totally and you’ve proven those points, but he said I’ve got 10,000 emails here telling me that that seal hunt is wrong. So what am I supposed to do about it? He said that to vote against the ban would be suicide.

Winter: Yes, I ran into that as well.

Stenson: We’ve all seen it and we all know it. And even the European Food Safety Authority, they did their review and they said all of the Canadian regulations hunting seals meet the criteria for humane kill. We know that it does. In their final report, what they came out though was that yes, the methods as legally defined are humane in terms of a veterinary definition of humane killing, but we don’t know what compliance is. So therefore we’re going to say that we can ban it on humane grounds. I mean, that’s the equivalent of saying we’re going to ban cars because we don’t know how many people speed.

Winter: Exactly.

Stenson: But that’s where this whole concept of science and facts get thrown out the window.