This is Part 2 of the interview Dr. Garry Stenson and Jim Winter, conducted on November 4, 2025. Part 2 picks up with a focus on Stenson’s work on behalf of the Government of Canada supporting its World Trade Organization case against the European Union and its trade ban on seal products. Part 2 also explores topics such as the impact of climate change on seal ecosystems and health, the media’s in impacting perceptions seals and the complexities of the Canadian government’s approach to supporting seal-focused research.
Part 1 of the interview between Stenson and Winter is available here.
[Continued from Part 1]
Winter: The [World Trade Organisation] WTO Garry, I would assume you were also providing help with the Canadian government position and trying to deal with the WTO, correct? They essentially took that position.
Stenson: To a certain extent, yeah.
Winter: If I understand it correctly, that yes, the Canadian government has demonstrated everything you just said, but we have a larger issue here, the morality of it or some other reason so they had a reason to do what they did.
Stenson: Yes. I was less involved in the WTO because that was pretty well done all through Ottawa and it was all pretty straightforward. The WTO within their regulations allowed
bans on the basis of conservation.
Winter: Or morality.
Stenson: Well, no, not up until then. Up until that point, it was only conservation, and we had proven clearly that it wasn’t a conservation issue. And again, I’m not an expert on the WTO, but from my understanding of the WTO is that they had no basis within their own regulations to provide it to uphold the ban because it wasn’t a conservation issue. They admitted that it wasn’t a conservation issue. The EU admitted it wasn’t a conservation issue. The WTO for the first and as far as I know, the only time, brought in the morality issue and I’m not sure that actually gets anywhere within the WTO mandate, but it was totally a justification for a preconceived idea. And the game, it goes back to it that a lot of the things that have gone on with sealing, both in terms of sealing itself as well as the way people look at seals overall, it’s not based on science, it’s not based on logic, it’s based on emotions.
Winter: Emotions driven by some very dedicated groups with a particular worldview.
Stenson: Yes, in terms of the seal bans, yeah, I agree with you. But in terms of when you’re talking about predation, it’s the same thing. It doesn’t matter. I mean, there’s the parallel is there between them. Neither of those arguments are based on facts or based on logic. They’re based primarily upon emotions. I used to say that there were 3 definitions of humane killing. The first is a veterinary definition to not cause undue pain and suffering and clearly is within the methods used to kill seals. Once they’ve refined and approved the regulations, they fall in line with every veterinary group that’s looked at them who have said those meet the definition. Another definition of humaneness that you see out there are the people who don’t believe you should kill any animal. Those are the vegans and very dedicated people who don’t believe that you should kill any animal whatsoever. That’s fine, but that’s a moral sense. The one in the middle that I always have trouble with is that it’s OK to kill some things but not others.
Winter: Exactly.
Stenson: And that’s where you get into things like the entire US Marine Mammal Protection Act, the general perception of marine mammals being something that should not be killed. Or they should be treated differently. It’s a not logical in that sense. I mean you figure some of the strongest anti-hunting, anti-seal hunting groups are in the US and Australia. Australia has one of the largest hunts in the world in their kangaroo hunt. The US permits hunting regularly of many species. I don’t know how many hundreds of thousands of deer each year, and that’s considered a right to do. The humaneness of a deer hunt, and I don’t know enough about the Australian kangaroo hunt, but the humaneness of a deer hunt is nowhere near as well regulated or as humanely defined as a seal hunt is. But it’s OK to kill deer, but it’s not OK to kill a seal, and it’s something that’s not logical.
Winter: Yeah, primarily because there is a dedicated propaganda, for lack of a better word, campaign focused on the sealing as opposed to on the kangaroos or on the deer hunt so that it becomes a more volatile issue in the public mind, regardless of the facts.
Stenson: But it’s not just the seal hunt, it’s marine mammals as a whole.
Winter: Yes, it is broader than that.
Stenson: And there’s that perception that somehow marine mammals are different from other mammals. I mean you encounter it all the time. I mean it’s like the anti-whaling groups. I was involved in one of these adventure tourism groups just this summer and everybody was talking about orcas. I said no, they’re called killer whales. And someone, a man, said no, they’re orcas. And I said no, they’re killer whales. That’s the proper common name for them. Well, why are they calling them orcas? Well, orca was a term that started to be used and it is part of their scientific name, but it became popular during the whitewashing of the whales. You didn’t want to talk about a killer whale, so you called it an orca because it was bad to have a killer whale. So we’ll call it an orca. They’re sweet and cuddly.
In the early days of the seal hunt, I mean there was no question there were problems in the seal hunt and I mean to say that there wasn’t a way of ignoring the reality of it. But back in the 60s and the early 70s, there were problems with how seals were being killed. There were problems with how the quotas were being set. Well, it wasn’t until 1971 that they even had a quota. So there were real issues at the time and over the years there have been issues that have come up that have been dealt with. I mean in 1995 was when they went out and killed all the blue backs trying to claim that they were ”hopper” hoods, which was a nonsensical term. After they redid the regulations in 1993, they forgot the blinking eye reflex when they rewrote them and DFO was trying to bring that back in. Sealers argued against bringing that in saying, oh well, we don’t want to see that. I mean it would have been an easy win for the sealing industry to say fine we don’t have a problem with it. So I mean there were issues that needed attending along the way, improvement that were needed.
Winter: Yes, and for the most part, they got dealt with over a period of time for cooperation between science, science management and the industry to better the situation for all concerned.
Stenson: Yes.
Winter: So we end up where we are today. But where we are today is also very interesting. Let’s just leave that whole issue behind for a minute, if you don’t mind. We’re looking at a situation now in the Gulf. We’ve already lost all the whelping ice and the harp seals being ice breeders had took a look around and said, oh boy, I think we’ll move further north. But that then begs the question of how far and where will they be going or can they adapt to a non-ice breeding situation?
Stenson: Well, that’s the $64 million question. What’s going to happen in the future? There’s no indication that they can adapt to a non-ice situation. We’ve seen that a couple of times. We saw that in 2010 off the front when the ice did not form up until mid-March, we’ve seen that in the Gulf on a couple of years where there’s been virtually no ice. There’s no indication that harp seals are going to be going to land. And in the Gulf, the perfect contrast is grey seals, where grey seals have used the beaches. What looks to be happening with harp seals is that harp seals have traditional areas that they go to. They will continue to go to those traditional areas as long as there’s any ice available at all. So even if it’s bad ice, they’ll still go there. And that’s why we get those years where we have some very heavy mortality, because it is just bad ice. It does look like the best thing that could happen to harp seals is have no ice whatsoever in their traditional areas so they’ll have to then go and search out other areas.
Winter: Move farther north?
Stenson: Yes, move farther north. So we saw that in 2010 where we had a developing patch form up off of Makkovik. We’ve never seen one that far north ever before. But as I said in early March when that was when the patch was first forming up there was no ice in the South. We’ve seen that in the southern Gulf in a couple of years where it’s clear that some of those harp seals, well, I shouldn’t say it’s clear, it’s fairly well documented that some of those harp seals are moving north into the Front area. So they will go further north. And that’s one of the things that make it hard to estimate what’s going on because they are adaptable. Harp seals are quite adaptable in that they eat a lot of different things. So as the ecosystem changes, they can eat different things. They’re very mobile so they can search out different ice and you know as long as there is some ice available then in theory at least they can find it but at what cost to them is another question. You know, does it cost them more? And it’s a trade-off between what they can find for food versus where they have to go to.
Winter: You mean energy consumption and so on?
Stenson: Not necessarily because that’s what they do. You know, they’re swimming all the time. So whether they’re swimming in a circle or they’re swimming north-south, it may not necessarily have an impact. Where you get into a bigger problem is if you don’t have the food available where you need to be, or if you don’t have the food where – more importantly – the pups are. One of the questions that we have about the Greenland harp seal population that we’re seeing is that as that ice is changing, it’s getting thinner, getting closer to the Greenland coast so the pupping is closer to the Greenland coast. It does a couple of things. One, it moves the ice, that pupping ice, into the East Grand Current, which is a whole different ecosystem than out off of Jan Mayan where historically the persistence of that ice is different. They’re also more susceptible to polar bears that run along the Greenland coast. So I mean you have all of these other effects that will have some impact, but how they are going to play out over time? It’s hard to say.
Winter: And that’s exactly what’s playing on the Northwest Atlantic harp seals now is that the climate changes, I know people don’t accept that, but we are, I think all of us agree that the climatic changes that are reducing ice all along the area and it’s going to have serious impacts on what seals are able or not able to do in terms of survival.
Stenson: Yeah, of course, but they’re actually going to have even larger impacts on the whole ecosystem because that lack of ice is one of the things that’s driving why capelin are not recovered because the ice breakup, the ice melt, is important in triggering one of the things that always ticked me off about some of our oceanographers. It was only relatively recently that they ever started to think about the impacts of seasonal ice on the other components of the ecosystem. I mean, the seals are the easy one. I mean the direct impact of bad ice on seals is obvious, but it’s the indirect impacts. I think that the southern Gulf of St Lawrence is going to have a huge change in the overall ecosystem because you don’t have that seasonal ice pack….On the latest estimates there’s a new grey seal survey coming up. The population increase of grey seals overall is slowing. So I’ll be honest with you, I’ve always hated the term exploded. I mean it’s never made any sense. I mean to say that a population has exploded at the best a mammal is going to do theoretically a 12% increase, which under any other circumstances we wouldn’t call it an explosion. In most cases, they’re well below that. So I was just going to say it feeds into that emotion.
Winter: That’s a good word for the media.
Stenson: You know it gives a perception. You talk about exploding seals, but if a cod stock doubled in a year, which is theoretically possible, we wouldn’t say anything about it. We’d say, oh, isn’t this great? It’s done well. You wouldn’t say that it’s exploded. So because explosion also has a negative connotation to it, it’s a better word for something that you don’t like.
Winter: In a hypothetical sense, if you want to go out in a limb here or not, with the changes in climate moving the whelping patches with the moving the icing patches, and the reduced market availability and reduced incentives to hunt, where do you think the future of the science or budgeting for science for seal research is? Quality science is a necessary and ongoing effort to continue understanding better the sense of predation on other stocks in the ocean that we have to deal with. Where do you think that’s going to be once the pressure is off the sealing industry such as it is today?
Stenson: That’s a really good question. In 1989, we put in a proposal for a harp seal survey to Ottawa and it was turned down because they said we’re not hunting. I remember talking to Don Bowen at that time, and he said you won’t get another survey funded until something like a fisheries collapse. And the first survey I did was in 1990 was because of the fisheries collapse. In fact, I remember I was driving up to the building, the Northwest Atlantic Fishery Centre. I was coming down Newfoundland Drive and was about to cross East Whitehills Rd. on my way into work when over the radio on the news, I heard the minister announce a harp seal survey. They didn’t tell us, I heard it on the news. This was in late January and we had to be in the field third week of February. It was because of the fisheries collapse.
Virtually all of the funding that we’ve had since then has been because of predation. Very little of that, to be honest, has been funded because of hunting.
Winter: Well, that’s a good sign if they’re concerned about predation from the point of view of science.
Stenson: Well, yeah, because what it is that basically whenever we say anything, they don’t believe us. And so they fund us to prove ourselves wrong. It’s the way it’s. That’s the way it’s worked out, you know. Well, you’ve come up with these answers, but we don’t like answers. Is it going to continue that they will continue to fund these projects? A lot of that will be depending on bigger questions with the cod stocks, or primarily cod, because people don’t really give a damn about much else, at least not in this area. It will depend on what’s happening with cod. If they come back, then the question of predation is not going to be an issue anymore. People won’t care about it, and so they won’t bother to fund research on marine mammals overall. It’s like whales. They never, ever got any money. They didn’t put any money into whale research until they caught 12 right whales in the Gulf of St Lawrence and killed them. Then all of a sudden, oh well, geez, we better look at whales. So a lot of these decisions are a combination of what’s hitting the media, what do people care or appear to care about? And overall, what is the financial situation?
I mean, we got hit very hard in the 1990s when government cut back funding totally. Everything on the horizon suggests that there’s going to be major cutbacks in terms of science because it’s the easy thing to cut. In theory, you don’t lay people off, or you don’t have to lay too many people off. You’re still funding the basic things that government’s paying for, and science is in some ways almost a luxury item within a government budget. So what’s going to happen in the future? What little bit of money we get for seal research is going to be reduced. The overall cost of doing research, of course, is going up like everything else and it might simply be a point where it becomes too expensive for somebody to do it.
Winter: Outside of DFO, there have been some various different groups doing work. I remember the advisory group there when that reported back when Murray was the minister and then recently one on predation. These are funded externally of Ottawa. Some of them agree with what Ottawa’s or what science have come out of Ottawa. Some of them disagree. Is external funding a way to go with these kind of or external groups still a way to go as opposed to within DFO, do you think?
Stenson: Not for the types of things that you need to do. I’ll take the harp seals for an example. If you go back and you look at the harp seal assessments and particularly the latest one, it’s driven by a long term data set. We have data on reproductive rates. We have data on that go back to the 1950s. We have annual data on age structure going back to the 80s. These are things that are being done, I don’t like to say monitoring basis, but essentially that’s it’s those long term data sets that are driving our ability to understand how things have happened. And that’s actually one of the reasons why people focus on harp seals is because we have long-term data that that we’ve been able to maintain. Sometimes it’s been really hard to do, going back to our question about funding earlier. Those are not the kinds of things that external groups want to fund. The work that was published recently out of the Marine Institute, it’s an eco-path model. They took an old eco-path model and basically gave it to a student with minimal amount of cost involved in it and said “well play with this, take a couple of years to play with it: but it’s a short term project. None of that could be done without that long term database of all of the fishery stuff, but not just seals; all of the other fisheries data that went into these those sorts of projects. That’s [short term projects] the kind of thing that NSERC will fund. That’s the kind of thing that outside groups will fund. They won’t fund, government scientists or they won’t fund any scientists to go and spend 20 years collecting data on pup production or on reproductive rates [which form the basis of these short term projects].
Winter: So it would it be fair to say a lot of this ends up happening because there are headlines that come out of these things, what it boils down to is not science research, but peer group review or reviewing data, reviewing existing data and coming up with a different interpretation or something like that.
Stenson: A lot of that work that’s being done outside of the government in marine mammals and we’ll take Canada as being a bit different because really we don’t have very many people looking at marine mammals outside of the government; there’s not a strong academic focus towards marine mammals. You think about it. Memorial University here in Newfoundland is one of the best places in the world for marine mammals. I mean, in terms of whale and seals, we got more than most places and they never really had anybody at Memorial working on them in any great extent. You had Dr. Deane Renouf who for the most part was looking at behaviour of harbour seals on Miquelon and Dr. Jon Lien, who actually started also in psychology.
He got involved in in the entrapment questions, but both of those came from an animal behaviour point of view, not management type questions that we’re dealing with. So they’ve never really even had a marine mammal person who’s focused on marine mammal research at the university in a province that has probably the highest profile on marine mammals anywhere in the world.
Winter: It’s ironic, isn’t it?
Stenson: It’s very ironic if you look at, if you think about it across Canada, we had historically most of the research that was being done on seals came out of Guelph. So you had Dr. Keith Ronald, Dr. David Lavigne and then Lavigne students. So you know it came out of out of an inland university where there was an individual who had interest in marine mammals. In the Pacific, there are various groups involved.
Stenson: But there’s all kinds of whale work, not very much seal work, and it’s kind of behaviorally-ish because everything else cost too much money. You know, to actually get a boat out there to do something just is too expensive. You can do it a little bit with small boats in the Gulf type of thing. So there’s not been any real money put into marine mammal research outside of the DFO within Canada for years. It’s not high on the profile of NSERC or any of these other funding agencies. And I said this is in Canada because I mean the United States is totally different. There’s huge amount of money going into universities. I talked to some of these people down there and they say things like “there was this guy came and donated us a truck”, you know, as a private individual. We don’t have a lot of work going on. We’ll get the odd project here, the odd project there that comes up most of the stuff that’s done by the universities. So even if you take the UBC or we take Memorial here, they’re trying to piggyback on people giving them the data because they’re not going to get it themselves. It causes some problem because within science branch as a research scientist, we are in some ways very similar to an academic in the sense that we get promotions based on publications and doing stuff like that. So this concept that we can just hand out our data and give it away, it doesn’t bode well for collaborative work. So the best way it works is when you work collaboratively. And we’ve got lots and lots of examples of that. I mean, I had lots of students and so have may other government scientists, but it’s still fundamentally that the majority of that funding is coming from the government.
Winter: If you were a young person today and have an interest to pursue a science career, would you be optimistic and say to them, listen guys, there is a future within the structure that I just left?
Stenson: Oh, I think that there is a future but in a lot of ways it hasn’t changed. When I was an undergraduate in 1971, back in the Stone Age, I had a professor who told my class that if I wanted a job, don’t go into biology. And when I graduated with my PhD, I was lucky to walk into a job at DFO. But of all the people who graduated in and around me, I was the only one. I was just lucky. Maybe it was because I was willing to come to Newfoundland. I don’t know, but I really do think that helped. You know I’ve got the job I think it was because I was willing to come here that I was able to be employed. I’m quite happy, but it’s never easy to get to get in biology. It’s never been easy to get a job. I think we’ll go through a period like we did in the 90s where there were cutbacks, there was very little funding available to it. You did what you could and you just hope that you luck into something out of it but is it something I would recommend my kids to go? No, well, my kids are both artists, so they have uncertain, unstable financial futures anyways. So I suppose in that way it’s not that much different.
Winter: True enough. Well, unless the issue of predation stays in the forefront of people’s minds in the places of power within the government and the media mind for that matter, we really won’t see the focus that has been present in the past through yourself and other guys like you in the future. It’ll just sort of drift away because there won’t be the impetus there to do anything about it.
Stenson: Well, there is one other aspect to seal research; it’s been a key driver of our understanding of climate change. So besides seal predation, what we’ve been able to do with the harp seal work is really get to understand some of the aspects that are going on with climate change. It’s a sort of a roundabout and this, this is where things go. You never expect them to go. We were doing, I was working with Mariano Koen-Alonso. I think you know Mariano. And we have worked with Alejandro Buren who was a PhD student at the time.
Winter: Yes I know him.
Stenson: They came in to do a model of capelin, cod and harp seals, and look at what the interaction between the three are. The conclusion of that first study was that cod numbers were being really driven by capelin abundance. So the question became, well, what’s driving capelin abundance? And the question was, of course, are seals driving capelin abundance. So he looked at the impact of capelin predation by seals and it couldn’t explain capelin numbers. And I was talking to him one day and I was a little unhappy because we had been looking at ice and didn’t really know what the indirect impacts of ice was. I had talked to a couple of oceanographers about what the impact of seasonal ice is in Newfoundland and they had never thought about it. And so I said to Alejandro, I asked if had he looked at the ice and he said no, not really, but we’ll look at it. So he came back a couple of weeks later. He says, you know, there’s a relationship between ice retreat and capelin numbers. How the heck does that work? So he found work that indicated that the timing of ice retreat affects the timing of the primary productivity bloom and so then timing of primary productivity affects whether or not you’ve got a good zooplankton population because it has to match in time. If you’ve got a good phytoplankton bloom at the time when zooplankton comes out of its winter diapause, you have a good zooplankton population and you end up with a good capelin abundance. If it’s not at the right time, then you get poor zooplankton survival and poor capelin survival. That concept of indirect effects of climate change has changed how we look at capelin, changed how we’ve looked at a number of other species, even some other of the shellfish species. It also affects how we look at cod abundance because capelin and cod are linked. So it’s really that questions of how harp seals, which is because we’ve got the data on them, how looking at harp seals have changed how we look at the ecosystem and their ecosystem. They’re an ecosystem monitor for what things are going on. More recently, we were able to go back through some old data and look at hooded seal numbers and we see that hooded seal population has declined dramatically. Although we suspected something similar to what’s happening, we don’t have any data that can show it one way or another. So questions of climate change might become the driver of this seal research in the future.
Winter: So climate change, combined with the predation and the stocks that have commercial value in society, would be the sort of case for the political decisions that would end up funding the kind of research you’d like to see done.
Stenson: I think so. The issue of the advantage of things like seals and the advantage actually to Newfoundland, and I think a lot of people don’t recognize this, is that they talk a lot about the Arctic climate change but there are relatively short data series in the Arctic. They don’t have a lot of data for many of these places over time. But because of the commercial fisheries here off the Labrador coast, and the research that’s been carried on everything from phytoplankton and the impact of water temperatures, they can actually build these ecosystem questions and how climate change impacts the ecosystems. And because we’ve got data going back to the 1940s, to the 50s, to the 60s, that’s the kind of thing you need, I think it’s the place where you really should be focusing your thoughts and it means that you may have to change a little bit on what your questions are, but a lot of that fundamental data is still required.
Winter: Well, let us hope that there is a there is a future in it. Garry, this has been fascinating. I’ve enjoyed talking to you and it’s been interesting to see the various perspectives come through because we’ve touched on all aspects of the industry there and I think most of the questions that are out in the public mind, so thanks very much.
Stenson: I’ve been involved in it for a long time, so it was actually good to have the chance to try and pull together some of these ideas.
Winter: Yes, and I’ve enjoyed it. Thank you.
Seals, Stigma and Survival 