In October 1980, while a campaigner with Friends of the Earth, I engaged in a televised debate with a seal culler. Despite a total lack of scientific evidence to justify their claim that seal numbers adversely effected commercial fish catches, the pro-culling lobby fiercely defended the annual carnage during which thousands of days-old grey seal pups were slaughtered on the Orkney Islands north east of mainland Scotland.

A combination of activists standing between the rifles and the pups, public outrage at television film of seas turned red with innocent blood, and the collapse of the sealskin market, brought about the end of this mass destruction of the people of the sea.

Campaigners celebrated with a dram or two and moved on to the next issue. I went to work for The Scottish Anti-Vivisection Society (now Animal Concern) and campaigned against experiments on animals.

The British public did not forget about the plight of seals. International organisations raised vast sums of money in the United Kingdom to fund campaigns against seal culling in Canada, Norway, Russia and South Africa. British politicians were mobilised and quite rightly condemned other countries for their policy of killing seals. After all the Brits were the good guys, we had banned seal culling around our coasts.

However while attention inside Britain focused on factory farms and vivisection, Scottish seals continued to be persecuted in a secret slaughter carried out far away from the glare of local, far less international, publicity.

In January 1988 I followed up reports of seals being shot on the River Helmsdale in north-east Scotland. The Helmsdale River Board, claiming they were protecting salmon entering the river to spawn, had killed 20 seals. Locals, who helped me find some of the shot seals, told me that as many as two hundred seals were killed every year at nearby commercial salmon netting stations.

The publicity which this case generated resulted in other reports of seal shootings in Scotland. On the Mull of Kintyre a salmon netsman wiped out a colony of seals. On the island of Raasay, I photographed several carcasses of shot seals, washed ashore opposite a salmon farm. At St. Cyrus National Nature Reserve near Montrose, a salmon netsman who admitted shooting seals was found to be an Honorary Warden for the Nature Conservancy Council.

The one thing these cases had in common was that no British laws were being broken. As long as the correct calibre of bullet is used, anyone with a relevant firearms licence variation can shoot seals near any fishing or fish farming equipment at any time of the year. No proper records are kept of people who shoot seals, or of the number of seals shot each year. In 1993 one salmon netsman openly admitted to killing over 90 seals a year at just one harbour in Morayshire. With over three hundred fish farm sites, over one hundred netting stations and countless lobster fishing operations, I estimate that, at the very least, 5000 seals are shot annually around Scotland.

In 1988, a farmhand at The Maclennan Salmon Company on Skye wrote to me claiming that seals were regularly shot at the intensive salmon unit where he worked. I went to Skye to investigate and was horrified to discover that a shotgun was being used to maim and kill seals. My contact, Simon Upton, bravely agreed to give evidence and, with his testimony and that of several others, we secured the first (and to date only) successful prosecution under the Conservation of Seals Act 1970.

It emerged in court that the company-owned shotgun was used on a regular basis to shoot seals. The accused, Dane Reeve, had admitted to Alex Scotland of the Sunday Mail newspaper that he used the shotgun to kill 6 seals in one month alone. On 1st of August 1989 Mr. Reeve was found guilty and fined the grand total of £200. This was equivalent in value to a dozen of the several thousand salmon in just one floating cage at the farm.

While I was researching the terrible toll humans inflict on the seal population a natural disaster wrecked havoc on these animals. It was the first phocine distemper virus epidemic of 1988 which prompted me to establish the Save Scotland's Seals Fund (SSSF). An offshoot of Animal Concern the SSSF was created to bring together all the major organisations involved in seal protection. We invited all the main groups to put a representative on the SSSF board. The idea being that we could co-ordinate fundraising and rescue work thus saving time and money and avoid duplicating work and wasting resources.

Regretfully not one organisation agreed to join with us and went off to do there own thing. The first thing most seemed to do was to put adverts in newspapers seeking funds. These massive ads competed with each other to bring in money. On the ground the lack of co-ordination meant that some areas (usually those with the biggest media presence) were swamped with seal rescue teams while other areas were totally ignored.

The Save Scotland's Seals Fund decided to concentrate on helping small local rescue groups which lacked the backing of the big organisations. We also decided that our main aim would be to highlight the human persecution of Scottish seals which all the other organisations seemed to ignore.

It was at this time I received a telephone call from a softly spoken young woman from the Hebridean Isle of Islay. She told me how she sang to the seals at Kildalton and wanted to do something to help protect these animals. I took a flight to Islay, half expecting to meet someone who was overdoing it on the very nippy sweeties from the local distilleries.
Less than an hour after leaving Glasgow, I was sitting on a rocky islet, twenty feet behind Fiona as she played her violin. First one dark head broke the surface, then another and another and yet another. In ten minutes at least 25 seals had gathered to listen to the music. Heads held high above the water, they drifted past on the tide, dived and swum back to their starting point to float past once again.

With Fiona, instead of peddling the horror of seal shootings, I had a new and far more attractive image to promote. Television, radio and newspaper reporters queued to visit Islay and see the woman who sang to the seals. By controlling these visits and ensuring the presence of outsiders did not disturb the seal colony, it was possible to open the eyes of a much wider public to the beauty of seals and the ugliness of how humans persecute them.

This was very important after that first virus epidemic faded out. The major organisations all disappeared from the Scottish scene and the fish farmers, salmon netsmen and salmon angling bodies dusted down their rifles and restarted the silent slaughter of the seals. With Fiona's help we continue to draw attention to this needless cruelty.

Thousands of seals are still shot every year. Seals have even been fed fish booby-trapped with explosives and razor blades. In December 1995, 25 baby grey seals were illegally shot and killed at South Ronaldsay, Orkney. Ignoring the fact that human overfishing threatens the very existence of our marine ecosystem there are growing calls for a mass cull of as many as fifty thousand seals. It has even been suggested that seal meat is turned into pet food and their penises sold to China as aphrodisiacs.

In 1996 it was decided that the Save Scotland's Seals Fund should become a stand-alone organisation. Renamed the Save Our Seals Fund and with a new Constitution it was recognised as a Scottish charity on 26th November 1996. While Animal Concern continues to campaign for changes in the law to protect seals the Save Our Seals Fund concentrates on supporting small seal rescue units and educating the public on how to protect seals and their marine environment.

You can read about how we help the sanctuaries elsewhere on this site. At the moment we are desperately trying to raise funds to replace the seal rescue boat on Islay. In the long term my dream is to see a large dedicated sea mammal protection vessel based in Scotland. We have thousands of miles of coastline, Europe's biggest seal population and resident and visiting populations of whales and dolphins. Our seas are being over-plundered for commercial gain and it is only through the support of good people like you that we can protect the people of the sea and their fragile environment. Human exploitation and destruction of the marine ecosystem threatens all life on earth.

John F. Robins, Secretary, Save Our Seals Fund October 2002

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