Canada will impose new rules for killing seals to make the annual hunt more humane, just as the European Union is weighing a ban that could devastate the industry.
The federal Fisheries Department will set new standards that call for hunters to sever the arteries of seals after they have been shot or clubbed in order to ensure their deaths are quick and less painful, according to spokesman Phil Jenkins.
"What we're trying to do is just make improvements where we can," Mr. Jenkins said. "It's another level of ensuring that this hunt is as humane as it can be."
Although Canadian officials say the decision has been in the works since a veterinarians group called in 2005 for a "three-step process" for killing seals, this week's move could not come at a more crucial time.
The European Union will decide later this month whether to ban the import of seal products.
That decision will follow the publication this month of a report by a Danish consulting group on the socioeconomic impact of a ban on northern communities.
And another key EU report, issued in December, makes Canada's change of practice critical.
The European Food Safety Authority issued an official "scientific opinion" that said seals can be hunted humanely, but in practice are sometimes left to die slowly, in pain. They recommended the "three-step" method be required.
Fisheries Minister Loyola Hearn is expected to announce the quota for the 2008 seal hunt this week. Last year, Canadian hunters were allowed to take 270,000 harp seals, of an estimated harp seal population of 5.5 million.
At the same time, Canada is intensely lobbying European officials and politicians to forestall a ban.
The changes to the Canadian rules for how the seals should be killed will meet the demands of EU scientific opinion - although perhaps not the objections of politicians and activists.
The "three-step" method essentially requires that an extra step of bleeding the seals be done quickly to ensure they do not languish in pain.
Right now, hunters who first shoot a seal, or hit it with a club or hakapik - the traditional seal-hunting tool that looks like an ice-pick - are supposed to stop to check that the seal is irreversibly unconscious by, for example, seeing if the stunned seal blinks when its eyes are touched.
Under the new rules, hunters will also have to cut the seal's arteries to ensure it bleeds out, and dies quickly.
"When a seal is bled, it is going to be, for sure, dead. That's severing the arteries under the flippers," Mr. Jenkins explained.
In September, 2006, the EU started a move toward a seal ban that would rule out imports of products of "cruel seal-hunting methods," which they said included stunning by "hakapiks, bludgeons and guns."
But while the EU's politicians felt clubbing and shooting seals is cruel, its scientific body concluded that's not necessarily true.
The process for asking the EU bureaucracy to draft the regulations ban included requesting a scientific opinion from its Food and Safety Authority, which concluded that "many seals can be, and are, killed rapidly and effectively without causing avoidable pain, distress, fear, and other forms of suffering..."
However, the EFSA said that in practice, seals sometimes suffer while they die slowly after being bludgeoned. It recommended that bleeding-out be added in a three-step killing method to ensure a humane hunt.
Campbell Clark