Seals face welfare challenges from commercial hunting, accidental entanglement in fishing gear, plastic pollution, and disease. Understanding these threats helps advocates target the most impactful interventions.
Seal welfare encompasses multiple serious threats. Commercial hunting, where it continues, raises welfare questions about the speed and reliability of killing methods — clubbing and shooting both have potential to cause prolonged suffering if poorly executed. Bycatch deaths involve drowning, a stressful and prolonged death for air-breathing mammals. Entanglement in fishing gear and plastic causes slow death from strangulation, starvation, or infection. Botulism, phocine distemper, and other diseases cause mass suffering in seal colonies. Wildlife rehabilitation organizations provide direct welfare benefit to individual injured or orphaned seals. Population-level interventions through fishing gear reform and marine pollution reduction have the greatest aggregate welfare impact.