Mystery over slaughter of pregnant seals
22nd September 2006
The Canadians will be proud: Pregant seals were found dead on a beach in the Orkney Islands, an archipelago in the far north of Britain - a traditionally animal-loving country.
Viewed from the headland, the heavily pregnant seal appeared to be dozing in the late autumn sunshine, sprawled out peacefully on a mound of pebbles and rich auburn kelp. Her nose was wet and shiny, her whiskers bristled proudly, and from the roundness of her mottled grey belly, I could see clearly that the pup she carried was almost full-term.
Stepping down on to the shore, however, this idyllic image of a magnificent female grey seal was abruptly shattered.
The plump, 6ft-long creature was not 'resting'; that was now painfully evident. In fact, she had recently been slaughtered. Her lower jaw had been blown away by a rifle bullet, exposing broken teeth and a lolling tongue. Her eyes had since been pecked away by scavenging seabirds, leaving ghoulish, red-rimmed holes in her skull. The whiskers that had seemed so healthy from a distance were flecked with blood. The seal's unborn pup was, of course, dead, too.
And bobbing around in the ebbing grey tide, just a few yards offshore, there were the corpses of four more seals - three of them pregnant.
If this had been Canada, where the culling of seals is a national sport in all but name, then the scene before me might have been
marginally less shocking. Or Norway, perhaps, where the lives of seals are similarly devalued.
Yet the barbarity I witnessed this week had occurred not in a country unsympathetic to wildlife, but in Britain, in the Orkney Islands.
This is a community where seals have long been revered, and are still afforded mystical status by some old sea-faring families. They believe that a person who kills a seal loses his soul to the animal and is destined to live as a seal in the next life.
It was here, moreover, 16 years ago, that kindly volunteers (funded, in part, by the Daily
Mail) nurtured hundreds of seals back to good health after an outbreak of distemper had devastated the seal population.
Sadly, however, this latest slaughter - uncovered by a retired local farmer out walking at the Point of Vastray, a remote beach on the north-east coast of mainland Orkney - was not some isolated incident. Far from it.
According to Orkney Seal Rescue founder Ross Flett, 62, who had the unpleasant task of examining the pregnant victims, shooting seals has become 'an annual event' in the islands during recent years.
'For every batch of seals reported to
have been shot, we know that very many more go undiscovered,' says Flett. 'It is estimated that about 5,000 seals are killed every year by fishfarmers and lobster creelmen.
'Some fishermen are OK, but others are crazy when it comes to seals. It's just their mentality. Officially, the last seal cull took place here in 1983, but out in the secluded bays, where no one is there to protect them, they are still being shot needlessly, in large numbers.'
So why are the killers being allowed to get away with it? The answer lies partly in apathy: that much became clear as I arrived in Orkney this week.
The killing of four expectant female seals made headlines in England, yet it was of only passing interest to the Scottish media. Indeed, when I told the car rental office manager at Kirkwall Airport why I was visiting, he stared at me blankly.
'Och, a few dead seals don't get people very excited round these parts, I'm afraid,' he said. 'It's only you cuddly bunny-huggers down South who care about all that.'
Given such indifference, it is not surprising that Orkney Seal Rescue is in danger of dying from neglect. Ross Flett runs it alone, nursing injured seals in converted outbuildings at his isolated seaside cottage. The annual budget is only £10,000, so, to raise his two sons, Flett also works at an old folks' centre and runs guided tours at the local cathedral.
In the Orkney of 2006, the role of Seal Protector requires a stout nerve, too. Several years ago, someone shot a hole in the sign at the entrance to his driveway and sawed off the head of the metal seal figure that adorned it.
'You next!' was the menacing message left by the attacker. And herein, very probably, we find our first clue to the identity of the phantom seal-killer or killers.
Until now, the accepted wisdom among local folk - and, indeed, the police - has been that the shootings must be the work of ordinarily law-abiding creelmen and salmon farmers who regard seals as a threat to their livelihood.
Whether seals really do raid mesh-covered lobster pots, or creels, devouring both the bait and the trapped lobsters - as the creelmen contend - is a matter for heated debate.
Robert Smith, secretary of the local creel fishermen's organisation, claims that one member lost all his 160 pots in this way. With each lobster selling to traders for £11 each, it was a sizeable loss.
Flett, like many seal experts, counters that seals would never eat anything less than freshly-caught fish and seldom even touch the pots.
Whatever the truth, in Orkney, where shellfish are of such vital importance (Orkney lobster is world-renowned and, together with velvet and brown crab, boosts the local economy by almost £3 million annually), the suggestion that
creelmen are the killers is compelling.
My own inquiries this week have yielded a different theory, however. One that is altogether more chilling.
It is that the mysterious slaughter of Orkney's seals is largely the work of one man - and that he is butchering them simply for kicks.
The evidence for this remains, as yet, sketchy, and certainly would not stand up in a court of law. Nevertheless, if the island's authorities are sincerely interested in ending the seal slaughter, I am convinced that it should be more thoroughly investigated.
The five dead seals were found last Saturday afternoon, by retired farmer James Mowatt, 66. He was feeding his ponies in a field next to the remote beach when he spotted the first carcass.
Mr Mowatt is accustomed to seeing the occasional dead seal on the shore - 'but never five in one place at the same time' - so he phoned police at Kirkwall. They did not trouble to interview him, he says, not even on the phone. Instead they alerted Ross Flett, who inspects and tags dead seals at their behest.
If the police had made a 40-minute drive to see Mr Mowatt, they might have gleaned some useful information. Shortly before he saw the seals, he told me, he met a stranger with a 12-bore shotgun, who said he was hunting rabbits.
'He was middle-aged, was wearing a camouflage jacket and he had an old, black labrador with him,' Mr Mowatt recalls. 'From his accent, he certainly wasn't Orcadian, and he was driving a dark-coloured Audi A4.'
The seals were each shot once with a large-calibre gun. According to Flett, four were hit in the skull, while a fifth had been shot in the mouth.
What kind of weapon despatched them? We cannot know, for no
forensic tests have been conducted. Was the stranger in the Audi in any way involved, if only as a witness? Again we cannot know, because no efforts have been made to trace him.
'The police seem to care more about motoring offences than seals,' Mr Mowatt sighed. However, there are those who would argue that the police face significant problems in successfully prosecuting seal-killers.
The Conservation of Seals Act 1970 contains a gaping loophole that gives fishermen virtual carte blanche to slaughter seals with impunity.
The get-out clause comes in Section 9 (1c), which permits the killing of any seal swimming 'in the vicinity' of fishing nets or tackle. Lamentably, someone forgot to include a definition of the word 'vicinity', as used in the Act. Does it mean a few yards, or several miles?
This uncertainty has led Scotland's legal establishment to conclude that securing a successful prosecution would be well-nigh impossible, even if the gunman's actions were witnessed and his identity established beyond doubt.
In 36 years, therefore, only one person has ever been convicted of killing a seal - a man on the Isle of Skye, who was seen to use a shotgun, rather than the requisite highpowered rifle, which supposedly averts the risk of leaving a seal wounded, rather than killing it outright. Orkney's fishing community is a hive of rumour about the latest seal killings. According to one grizzled old fishing-boat repairer I spoke to in Kirkwall, however, 'what's different here is that the gossip invariably turns out to be true'.
The whispers led me to an experienced lobster creelman of early middle-age, who lives in a comfortable home with his wife and children. This man, I was authoritatively informed, was widely known to have killed many seals - legally or otherwise. If he had not shot the Vastray seals, he may well know who did.
For legal reasons, I cannot disclose his identity, but over tea in his living room he told me a remarkable story. Clearly indifferent towards seals, who he regards as 'pests', he admitted having shot 'about 20', though none recently - and only those which threatened his creels.
The man responsible for the Vastray slaughter - and '99 per cent of the seals shot around here' - was another member of his family, he claimed. This relative enjoyed using seals 'as targets', he said.
Why? 'He's evil,' came the stark reply.
He went on to describe in detail how the alleged marksman stalked the islands looking for seals, then picked them off from the headland using a high-velocity rifle.
'I know he shot the five at Point of Vastray because he was seen shooting them,' he claimed.
Four years ago, sick of being blamed for the seal shootings himself, the creelman told me he informed Northern Constabulary that his relative was the real killer.
To corroborate his story, he showed me the letter of reply from the then Deputy Chief Constable, Keith Cullen. It stated that his allegations about the seal killings and other matters would not be acted upon because there was 'insufficient evidence to substantiate them'.
However, when the accused relative, also a lobster creelman, contacted me to assert his innocence - he passed back the blame for slaughtering many of the seals on to his accuser.
He also insisted that salmon farmers were responsible for most of the slayings.
'I spoke to a fisherman who reckons he is shooting as many as 200 seals a year. I would say fishfarmers, in the course of a year, shoot 10,000 seals. It sounds a lot, but there's that many here that it doesn't even make a dent in the population.'
The rumours, inevitably, have also reached Orkney wildlife crime officer, PC David Dawson.
A dedicated police officer, PC Dawson said he was 'aware that he [the accused man] had shot seals in the past - legally in the eyes of the law', but urged me to treat with caution allegations that he had killed them indiscriminately.
Wildlife protection is only one strand of his work, and in an area as far-flung as Orkney, he cannot hope to investigate successfully the shooting of seals unaided.
Nevertheless, back in a more idealistic era - when Orkney's seals were there to be saved rather than shot - one wonders whether evidence of cruelty, however
tentative, might have been afforded greater importance by the police.
As the islands off north-eastern Scotland are home to some 20,000 grey seals (20 per cent of the world's population) and 8,000 common seals, one wonders why more is not being done to secure their welfare.
Yesterday, a man walking on the sandy beach at Glimbs Holm, 15 minutes' drive south of Kirkwall, reported seeing two more dead seals. The high tide hampered Ross Flett's attempts to discover whether they are more shooting victims.
By a merciful act of nature, four of the pregnant Point of Vastray seals have now been washed away by the tide, beyond the gaze of passing ramblers.
Yesterday, however, the fifth seal remained silhouetted against against the pebbles. No one can be bothered to dispose of a seal's body on Orkney these days, it would seem.
And so, in one final indignity, mother and undelivered pup must lie rotting on the beach - food for the scavengers - until the high winter tides draw a veil over them.
dailymail.co.uk
22nd September 2006
The Canadians will be proud: Pregant seals were found dead on a beach in the Orkney Islands, an archipelago in the far north of Britain - a traditionally animal-loving country.
Viewed from the headland, the heavily pregnant seal appeared to be dozing in the late autumn sunshine, sprawled out peacefully on a mound of pebbles and rich auburn kelp. Her nose was wet and shiny, her whiskers bristled proudly, and from the roundness of her mottled grey belly, I could see clearly that the pup she carried was almost full-term.
Stepping down on to the shore, however, this idyllic image of a magnificent female grey seal was abruptly shattered.
The plump, 6ft-long creature was not 'resting'; that was now painfully evident. In fact, she had recently been slaughtered. Her lower jaw had been blown away by a rifle bullet, exposing broken teeth and a lolling tongue. Her eyes had since been pecked away by scavenging seabirds, leaving ghoulish, red-rimmed holes in her skull. The whiskers that had seemed so healthy from a distance were flecked with blood. The seal's unborn pup was, of course, dead, too.
And bobbing around in the ebbing grey tide, just a few yards offshore, there were the corpses of four more seals - three of them pregnant.
If this had been Canada, where the culling of seals is a national sport in all but name, then the scene before me might have been
marginally less shocking. Or Norway, perhaps, where the lives of seals are similarly devalued.
Yet the barbarity I witnessed this week had occurred not in a country unsympathetic to wildlife, but in Britain, in the Orkney Islands.
This is a community where seals have long been revered, and are still afforded mystical status by some old sea-faring families. They believe that a person who kills a seal loses his soul to the animal and is destined to live as a seal in the next life.
It was here, moreover, 16 years ago, that kindly volunteers (funded, in part, by the Daily
Mail) nurtured hundreds of seals back to good health after an outbreak of distemper had devastated the seal population.
Sadly, however, this latest slaughter - uncovered by a retired local farmer out walking at the Point of Vastray, a remote beach on the north-east coast of mainland Orkney - was not some isolated incident. Far from it.
According to Orkney Seal Rescue founder Ross Flett, 62, who had the unpleasant task of examining the pregnant victims, shooting seals has become 'an annual event' in the islands during recent years.
'For every batch of seals reported to
have been shot, we know that very many more go undiscovered,' says Flett. 'It is estimated that about 5,000 seals are killed every year by fishfarmers and lobster creelmen.
'Some fishermen are OK, but others are crazy when it comes to seals. It's just their mentality. Officially, the last seal cull took place here in 1983, but out in the secluded bays, where no one is there to protect them, they are still being shot needlessly, in large numbers.'
So why are the killers being allowed to get away with it? The answer lies partly in apathy: that much became clear as I arrived in Orkney this week.
The killing of four expectant female seals made headlines in England, yet it was of only passing interest to the Scottish media. Indeed, when I told the car rental office manager at Kirkwall Airport why I was visiting, he stared at me blankly.
'Och, a few dead seals don't get people very excited round these parts, I'm afraid,' he said. 'It's only you cuddly bunny-huggers down South who care about all that.'
Given such indifference, it is not surprising that Orkney Seal Rescue is in danger of dying from neglect. Ross Flett runs it alone, nursing injured seals in converted outbuildings at his isolated seaside cottage. The annual budget is only £10,000, so, to raise his two sons, Flett also works at an old folks' centre and runs guided tours at the local cathedral.
In the Orkney of 2006, the role of Seal Protector requires a stout nerve, too. Several years ago, someone shot a hole in the sign at the entrance to his driveway and sawed off the head of the metal seal figure that adorned it.
'You next!' was the menacing message left by the attacker. And herein, very probably, we find our first clue to the identity of the phantom seal-killer or killers.
Until now, the accepted wisdom among local folk - and, indeed, the police - has been that the shootings must be the work of ordinarily law-abiding creelmen and salmon farmers who regard seals as a threat to their livelihood.
Whether seals really do raid mesh-covered lobster pots, or creels, devouring both the bait and the trapped lobsters - as the creelmen contend - is a matter for heated debate.
Robert Smith, secretary of the local creel fishermen's organisation, claims that one member lost all his 160 pots in this way. With each lobster selling to traders for £11 each, it was a sizeable loss.
Flett, like many seal experts, counters that seals would never eat anything less than freshly-caught fish and seldom even touch the pots.
Whatever the truth, in Orkney, where shellfish are of such vital importance (Orkney lobster is world-renowned and, together with velvet and brown crab, boosts the local economy by almost £3 million annually), the suggestion that
creelmen are the killers is compelling.
My own inquiries this week have yielded a different theory, however. One that is altogether more chilling.
It is that the mysterious slaughter of Orkney's seals is largely the work of one man - and that he is butchering them simply for kicks.
The evidence for this remains, as yet, sketchy, and certainly would not stand up in a court of law. Nevertheless, if the island's authorities are sincerely interested in ending the seal slaughter, I am convinced that it should be more thoroughly investigated.
The five dead seals were found last Saturday afternoon, by retired farmer James Mowatt, 66. He was feeding his ponies in a field next to the remote beach when he spotted the first carcass.
Mr Mowatt is accustomed to seeing the occasional dead seal on the shore - 'but never five in one place at the same time' - so he phoned police at Kirkwall. They did not trouble to interview him, he says, not even on the phone. Instead they alerted Ross Flett, who inspects and tags dead seals at their behest.
If the police had made a 40-minute drive to see Mr Mowatt, they might have gleaned some useful information. Shortly before he saw the seals, he told me, he met a stranger with a 12-bore shotgun, who said he was hunting rabbits.
'He was middle-aged, was wearing a camouflage jacket and he had an old, black labrador with him,' Mr Mowatt recalls. 'From his accent, he certainly wasn't Orcadian, and he was driving a dark-coloured Audi A4.'
The seals were each shot once with a large-calibre gun. According to Flett, four were hit in the skull, while a fifth had been shot in the mouth.
What kind of weapon despatched them? We cannot know, for no
forensic tests have been conducted. Was the stranger in the Audi in any way involved, if only as a witness? Again we cannot know, because no efforts have been made to trace him.
'The police seem to care more about motoring offences than seals,' Mr Mowatt sighed. However, there are those who would argue that the police face significant problems in successfully prosecuting seal-killers.
The Conservation of Seals Act 1970 contains a gaping loophole that gives fishermen virtual carte blanche to slaughter seals with impunity.
The get-out clause comes in Section 9 (1c), which permits the killing of any seal swimming 'in the vicinity' of fishing nets or tackle. Lamentably, someone forgot to include a definition of the word 'vicinity', as used in the Act. Does it mean a few yards, or several miles?
This uncertainty has led Scotland's legal establishment to conclude that securing a successful prosecution would be well-nigh impossible, even if the gunman's actions were witnessed and his identity established beyond doubt.
In 36 years, therefore, only one person has ever been convicted of killing a seal - a man on the Isle of Skye, who was seen to use a shotgun, rather than the requisite highpowered rifle, which supposedly averts the risk of leaving a seal wounded, rather than killing it outright. Orkney's fishing community is a hive of rumour about the latest seal killings. According to one grizzled old fishing-boat repairer I spoke to in Kirkwall, however, 'what's different here is that the gossip invariably turns out to be true'.
The whispers led me to an experienced lobster creelman of early middle-age, who lives in a comfortable home with his wife and children. This man, I was authoritatively informed, was widely known to have killed many seals - legally or otherwise. If he had not shot the Vastray seals, he may well know who did.
For legal reasons, I cannot disclose his identity, but over tea in his living room he told me a remarkable story. Clearly indifferent towards seals, who he regards as 'pests', he admitted having shot 'about 20', though none recently - and only those which threatened his creels.
The man responsible for the Vastray slaughter - and '99 per cent of the seals shot around here' - was another member of his family, he claimed. This relative enjoyed using seals 'as targets', he said.
Why? 'He's evil,' came the stark reply.
He went on to describe in detail how the alleged marksman stalked the islands looking for seals, then picked them off from the headland using a high-velocity rifle.
'I know he shot the five at Point of Vastray because he was seen shooting them,' he claimed.
Four years ago, sick of being blamed for the seal shootings himself, the creelman told me he informed Northern Constabulary that his relative was the real killer.
To corroborate his story, he showed me the letter of reply from the then Deputy Chief Constable, Keith Cullen. It stated that his allegations about the seal killings and other matters would not be acted upon because there was 'insufficient evidence to substantiate them'.
However, when the accused relative, also a lobster creelman, contacted me to assert his innocence - he passed back the blame for slaughtering many of the seals on to his accuser.
He also insisted that salmon farmers were responsible for most of the slayings.
'I spoke to a fisherman who reckons he is shooting as many as 200 seals a year. I would say fishfarmers, in the course of a year, shoot 10,000 seals. It sounds a lot, but there's that many here that it doesn't even make a dent in the population.'
The rumours, inevitably, have also reached Orkney wildlife crime officer, PC David Dawson.
A dedicated police officer, PC Dawson said he was 'aware that he [the accused man] had shot seals in the past - legally in the eyes of the law', but urged me to treat with caution allegations that he had killed them indiscriminately.
Wildlife protection is only one strand of his work, and in an area as far-flung as Orkney, he cannot hope to investigate successfully the shooting of seals unaided.
Nevertheless, back in a more idealistic era - when Orkney's seals were there to be saved rather than shot - one wonders whether evidence of cruelty, however
tentative, might have been afforded greater importance by the police.
As the islands off north-eastern Scotland are home to some 20,000 grey seals (20 per cent of the world's population) and 8,000 common seals, one wonders why more is not being done to secure their welfare.
Yesterday, a man walking on the sandy beach at Glimbs Holm, 15 minutes' drive south of Kirkwall, reported seeing two more dead seals. The high tide hampered Ross Flett's attempts to discover whether they are more shooting victims.
By a merciful act of nature, four of the pregnant Point of Vastray seals have now been washed away by the tide, beyond the gaze of passing ramblers.
Yesterday, however, the fifth seal remained silhouetted against against the pebbles. No one can be bothered to dispose of a seal's body on Orkney these days, it would seem.
And so, in one final indignity, mother and undelivered pup must lie rotting on the beach - food for the scavengers - until the high winter tides draw a veil over them.
dailymail.co.uk