We asked Tero Härkönen, who has researched seals since the 1970s, three questions. Is it the seal's fault that the fish disappear? Is the seal doing something wrong? How important is the seal to the ecosystem?
Seal populations rebound after hunting ban and environmental efforts, sparking debate between conservation needs and the impact on fishing. Dive into the story.
Since almost four years ago, we have license hunting on gray seals, since two years on harbor seals and protection hunts on ringed seals since several years ago. We hunt all three seal species along the Swedish coast and there are several reasons.
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.
