Around the coastline of Ireland the waters and harbours are full of marine wildlife.
Among these animals live the common and grey seal.
The grey seal suffered from heavy commercial exploitation ever since early traders realized
they could make money from selling seal skins, blubber and meat.
The grey seal and the common seal now it's kind of misleading the name with them, the
grey seal is actually more common than the common seal, the common seal is also called
harbour seal, so you see them really in harbours, people see a lot more of them, they're a lot
more timid and friendly so they will kind of come up to fishing boats and like any tourist
boats or you know even any leisure vessels or anything like that.
The difference between them I suppose is common seals are smaller and they've got kind of
a stubby face and they're more cat-like looking and then the grey seal is the other one and
they're probably double or triple the amount of grey seals than there is common and they
all over Ireland like you get them anywhere, they do come into harbours as well and some
of them for instance out in Hoth Harbour are so used to fishing vessels that they come
right up and the fishermen will literally hand feed them like so they get really lazy
and fat and everything, I do get that friendly but generally grey seals are, they've got
longer noses, they're more grey in colour than the common seals, kind of dark brown
coat and generally grey seals are more aggressive as well so well they're all wall creatures
but for us here it's a lot easier to handle the common seal because they're kind of more
placid and timid but grey seals can be quite fearsome.
Fishermen would consider seals as competition for their catch but there's been no studies
to prove that it has actually reduced seals in area, reduced the fisherman's catch so
it can be very, it's very kind of aggravated situation and you know some fishermen do like
seals but they are allowed to choose seals within a certain distance of their nets but
it is legal but having said that you do still get seal calls, like there was one in the
Blaskets in November 2004 and 50 seals were killed and most of them were white coats so
that's under three years old and they were just butchered, some of them were, they got
with hammers, hit their heads in, some of them were just skins alive, none of the skins
were taken for any use in that because they used to be used for the fur trade and also
the blubber for making refined oil and for lamps like back when we didn't have electricity
you could see uses for seals been killed then but there's no excuse for it now.
My seals were the first into animals to be put on the endangered list, that was back
in 1937 I think it was, there has been an increase in the population since but it's
not nearly as high as it should be or it used to be.
Fishmen would say there's too many seals and they're competing for fish so they should
kill them but like there's not that many seals that it's going to really cause difficulties
with their catches or anything like that but having said that they're not in immediate
danger.
