Eighteen Years of Silence: Namibia's Seal Slaughter Persists.

In the 18 years since I have been at the forefront of the annual Namibian seal slaughter, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Back in the day, Namibia had a miniscule level of transparency in this event by sporadically publishing rolling quotas, season dates and total animals killed per season. After undercover footage of the slaughter was released globally in 2009 clearly showing several legal violations in the killing process and the world taking notice, the Namibian Government closed ranks. Trying to obtain any information regarding the sealing process and industry was an exercise in extreme patience and after all avenues have been exhausted, you’re still none the wiser.

International pressure campaigns yielded some results in that in 2012, after failed attempts by activists (who were met with violence) to obtain undercover footage caused an international uproar, Namibia’s Ombudsman agreed to hold a stakeholder meeting on the merits of the harvest. Various international animal organisations convened on Windhoek to present their thoroughly researched arguments; whereas in stark contrast, the presentations of the less than a handful of attending industry stakeholders appeared poorly constructed and painfully illogical and flawed. This was the first time that those fighting to get the killing stopped, felt any glimmer of hope that we will be successful in our quest to save the seals.

When the Ombudsman finally released the findings, which we were all waiting for with bated breath, this hope came crashing down like a bad hangover. The Ombudsman, in all his wisdom, declared that a seal is not an animal and therefore does not enjoy the protection of any legislation offering protections to animals. We were speechless. We all still are. The only “progress” – if you want to call it that - that emanated from this meeting was the Ombudsman’s instructions to effectively improve killing methods. He further declared that the “total number of the seal populations, the size of the quotas, the actual number of pups and male seals harvested, etc be published annually.”

Twelve years later and nothing has changed. Undercover footage obtained by the Paul Watson Foundation UK in 2023 mirrors the same violations observed by Stephen P. Kirkman, Ph.D., David M. Lavigne, Ph.D. in their paper From "Assessing the hunting practices of Namibia’s commercial seal hunt". And the lack of transparency also remains in place despite the Ombudsman’s 2012 instructions to publish numbers.

Since then, the Paul Watson Foundation UK submitted various questions to Namibia’s Ministry of Fisheries and Marine Resources under the country’s Access To Information Act of 2022. Some of these questions were as basic as provide the numbers killed for the last 10 years. According to this piece of legislation, answers to Requests for Information should be issued within 21 days. Yet five months after the fact and numerous emails later, not a single one of our questions has been answered and continuing attempts to rightfully obtain the information are met with ghosting.

But there have been a lot of changes to the dynamics of the industry.

For years, the prime target of the seal harvest were nursing seal pups who were crudely bludgeoned to death by untrained, exploited, indigent residents paid a pittance while the big bucks brought in by the luxurious seal pup fur, benefited the Turkish-Australian citizen who held the sole mandate for these pelts.

Since the international fur market has all but collapsed following tightened EU regulations, the main player in the market has moved on to more profitable markets. This left the field open to new interests.

And right on queue, a Chinese citizen who reportedly traffics protected rosewood in Namibia; has known affiliations with organised crime; and has been arrested several times for illegal wild life product activities without any successful prosecution, steps up and buys all but the entire floundering sealing industry: Hou Xuecheng, aka Jose Hou.

Formerly a secondary target, adult seal bulls now became the main target for their genitalia which are exported to the Far East for the Traditional Chinese Medicine market.

2023 saw Hou’s first foray in to a seal harvest. Although the season opened on 1 July, Hou only started killing activities on 24 October, giving him a total of 17 killing days to obtain a quota of 6 000 seal bulls. Although there was a quota for 80 000 pups, no pups were killed at the biggest of the two killing sites: Cape Cross. Only the bulls were targeted for their penises. According to unconfirmed sources, a very small amount of pups were killed at the other, inaccessible site of Wolf/Atlas Bay.

So I guess I should not have been surprised when Namibia announced that the quota for 2024 was 70 000 seal pups and 10 000 bulls. This is a clear indication that the Traditional Chinese Medicine market is the predominant driver of the killing. Seal pups have no real value anymore; and considering that in the 18 years I have been involved in this issue, not a single season’s quotas for pups were ever met – yet the numbers remain questionably high.

Over the years, one of the strategies employed in the fight was securing high level economic influencers to enter in to the dialogue. Their meeting with the Ministry of Fisheries and Marine Resources ended with these individuals being removed from the Minister of Fisheries and Marine Resources’ office with the parting words: “we don’t take kindly in former colonialists telling us how to run out country.” It was a crystal clear display of a nationalist sentiment which corroborated to me the fact that the killing really has no scientific merit and that there was invisible politics providing the foundation for the slaughter.

The common rhetoric sold to the public by the Namibian government to justify this large scale massacre, is that the seals eat all the fish and basically leaves many Namibians without food security. It is undeniable that the Cape fur seal populations in Namibia are currently plentiful but they do not consume commercially fished species and an outbreak of disease or a change in prey distribution due to changing sea temperatures can see population numbers rapidly shrink dramatically.

Meantime, natural predators of seals, such as sharks, have been decimated by a poorly managed, corrupt and inept government AND government departments. These are not unsubstantiated claims: the previous Minister of Fisheries and Marine Resources was arrested in 2019 for fraud and corruption after holding the position for numerous years; and the new Minister seems to say the right things while simultaneously upholding his predecessor’s policies. It is no secret that the country’s fishing industry is in crisis. Namibia is struggling to deal with large scale illegal, unregulated and unreported fishing by foreign agents; and shark populations have been diminished to near absence. But no organisation can hold the Namibian government accountable lest they be met with accusations of colonialism.

It is not only the fishing industry which is collapsing. Namibia’s leaders have sold out the country’s otherworldly beautiful environment to Chinese industries. And no matter how much Namibia tells itself that the country belongs to them, the glaring reality is that Namibia – and her leaders – belong to China.

Namibia gained independence from colonialist rule in 1990 and subsequently sold its soul to the highest bidder with the lowest morals. The irony of not wanting to be told “by former colonialists how to run their country”, is deafening. Those in charge are too blinded by power and money to realise that their country is still firmly in the grip of colonialism. The colonist just looks different.

South Africa stopped sealing in 1990. Sealing was and industry started by the former colonisers when Namibia was still part of South Africa. When South Africa halted this practice - the same year as Namibia's independence - the country's fish stocks stabilised and remain healthy.

If Namibia is serious about ridding themselves of any colonialist history, it would ban the continued business of colonisers: that of the needless, brutal, illogical, unsustainable, unscientific mass slaughter of the Cape Fur seal.