By Howard Schneider
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, October 10, 1997; Page A30

Canada's seal hunters, having withstood the wrath of Barbie and Brigitte Bardot, have quadrupled the size of their annual catch over the last two years to the highest levels since the early 1970s.

With government price subsidies and other assistance in helping open new overseas markets for seal pelts, penises and pepperoni, the largely Newfoundland-based seal fleet is now harvesting about 250,000 animals each winter – the greatest number since images of dewy-eyed pups being clubbed on the ice began forcing a downturn in the harvest in the early 1970s.

As a result, animal rights activists are preparing what they say will be their most aggressive effort in years to shut the industry down. Rather than imported talent – Bardot weighed in at one point, and a Barbie doll sticker album helped out in the mid-1980s – they have enlisted only home-grown Canadian celebs to lead the charge.

At the top of the list: Capt. James T. Kirk.

"As a Canadian, I think the commercial seal hunt sends the wrong image of our country," "Star Trek" actor William Shatner declares on a page of quotes attributed to a group of Canadian actors, writers and activists that was distributed today by the International Fund for Animal Welfare. "To slaughter those baby seals in what is supposed to be an enlightened age is totally inexcusable."

"All I would say is that I have great respect for Captain Kirk, and I have watched many of the [Star Trek] series, but we don't slaughter [baby] whitecoats, and those who do, action is taken," said Jacque Robichaud, director general of resource management for Canada's Department of Fisheries and Oceans. "Unfortunately, there are still postcards and pictures, and it is not a fact of the business."

It is true that the killing of newborn seals for their snow white pelts has been illegal for years in Canada, banned as worldwide public pressure rose against the practice in the 1970s and 1980s. But it is also true that it still happens; last fall, federal officials charged 101 Newfoundland fishermen with the illegal sale of nearly 15,000 seal pup pelts.

Perhaps it is to be expected that, entering season three of a reinvigorated Canadian seal hunt, the rhetoric will be thick. The controversy certainly has proved enduring, as much a part of the Canadian landscape as grain silos in Saskatchewan or road construction after the spring thaw. It is a clash that hits home in a country whose international humane image sometimes contrasts with its raw, resource-based reality.

For a while, the battle seemed to subside, as the animal welfare fund gained the upper hand. The United States and Europe restricted seal imports. The annual harvest fell to a low of about 60,000 animals each year. There was still subsistence hunting among Indians in the region – an activity not even the fund wants to restrict – but as a commercial venture, sealing seemed to be fading away on its own.

That began changing three years ago, when the federal department of fisheries was run by Newfoundland politician Brian Tobin, who is now the province's premier. Stung by the collapse of the Atlantic cod stocks, Tobin was looking for ways to put money back in the pockets of Newfoundland fisherman, and he decided an increased seal hunt was one way to do it. The seal herd was healthy at upward of 5 million animals, and there was even a brief assertion, since discounted, that a profusion of hungry seals is what caused the cod to disappear.

The allowable catch of seals was increased to 275,000, a number fisheries officials say can be sustained by the current population. The government began supporting the price of seal meat with subsidies that topped $1 million in their first year. Although not a big dinner table hit – most seal meat is fed to other animals – government marketers also helped with the development and sale of such products as seal pepperoni.

The bigger impetus, however, came from the opening of new Asian markets for seal pelts and penises. The pelts fetch around $20 each and are used for their fur or to make leather.

The market for seal penises, used for aphrodisiac and medicinal purposes, is also important. Organs from the more mature males can be sold for as much as $10 each, Robichaud said. In 1996, seal penis sales accounted for about 8 percent of the industry's income, or more than $500,000. Robichaud said that declined during last spring's hunt to around $100,000, because, he suspects, hunters are focusing on younger animals whose pelts are more valuable but whose genitals are not worth as much.

Hunters responded, and, as the industry rebounded, so did the clash with the animal welfare fund. Both sides came well-armed – the fund with videotapes of such atrocities as live seal-skinnings and botched clubbings, the industry with tales of how important sealing can be to fishermen isolated along Newfoundland's coast.

They fight over the economics: The fund says the roughly $7.5 million catch is of little consequence, particularly when the subsidies and costs are subtracted, while industry and government leaders say it is important to the few hundred sealers who club or shoot the bulk of the harvest. They fight over the culture: The animal welfare fund calls it is a relic, while sealers say it has been part of Newfoundland life since colonial times and should be sustained.

Sometimes they just fight. Last winter, an angry sealer chased a fund film crew from the ice with a knife. This year, the fund's Canadian director, Rick Smith, says the battle will be for keeps. Along with Shatner, the new effort – called Canadians Against the Commercial Seal Hunt – has signed up such fellow luminaries as movie director Norman Jewison and Michael Ondaatje, author of "The English Patient."

By the time the ice moves down from the Arctic and this year's litter of seal pups reaches huntable age in the spring, Smith promises "a grass-roots effort the likes of which this country has never seen."

"Babies for fur, adults for aphrodisiacs," said Toronto writer Irshad Manji. "It is the kind of waste that even the United States feels [is] disgusting enough to ban."