Sweden, Finland, and Norway conduct hunting for seals as trophy hunting. In most other countries, hunting of large marine mammals has been prohibited. In the USA, they have even banned the import of fish from countries that kill marine mammals to protect their fishing industry. Sweden doesn’t have much fish to export, so that import ban is unlikely to affect us significantly. However, we hunt a large marine mammal – and that is unique.
When the seal population had collapsed around 1980 and was almost completely extinct, the authorities put an end to all hunting. Seal protection areas were established, and all three species found along our coasts were protected. At the same time, we received EU directives to reduce emissions of DDT and PCBs. It led to the recovery of all three seal tribes.
The fish are running out, the herring and the baltic herring are threatened and the cod is almost completely gone. When there is a competition for the little fish left, many people want to blame the seal. Both that it eats too much of "our" fish and that it destroys our fishing gear. But how is it really? Does the seal eat more than we do, and what does it actually eat? We asked some seal researchers.
Targeted fishing for herring and sturgeon can also continue in 2024. The EU countries have agreed on significantly larger catch quotas than what the European Commission wanted to see.
