The Swedish Environmental Protection Agency decided this year that we should shoot 630 harbor seals, 1500 gray seals and 350 ringed seals. Some think that is far too few, others are worried that the seal population will fail again. We asked the scientists and got different answers.
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.
