Is March 15 the day Canada's seal hunt starts?

No. Canada's commercial seal fishery opens in spring once most pups have moulted, and in 2024 the Newfoundland and Labrador fishery opened on April 8, with the day of action set deliberately earlier.

Is it the same as International Day of the Seal on March 22?

No, they are two different observances. This one falls on March 15 and targets Canada's commercial hunt specifically, while International Day of the Seal on March 22 is a broader seal conservation day.

International Day of Action Against Canadian Seal Slaughter

Next celebratedMonday, March 15, 2027

Protesters gather outside Canadian consulates, embassies and high commissions each March 15 to press Canada to end a commercial hunt that still kills tens of thousands of harp seals a year.

See how to celebrate

Countdown to the day

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Last updated September 3, 2026 · by the Holiday Calendar TeamHave an update or spot an error?

YEARLY DATEMarch 15

OBSERVED INInternationally

CATEGORYAwareness

SUBCATEGORYAnimal Welfare

ORIGIN

Community Origin

FOUNDING ENTITY

Not documented

FIRST OBSERVED

2005

“The 15th of March has been known as the date by which debts are usually settled.

HOW THE HOLIDAY CAME TO BE

A coalition converged on a date nobody claims.

The earliest documented observance fell on 15 March 2005, when animal protection groups held protests at Canadian consulates and embassies in dozens of countries. No source identifies who first chose the date, though Friends of Animals explained it that year by the Ides of March, long known as the day debts are settled.

Read the 2005 Protest Announcementvia friendsofanimals.org

INTRO

The seals are still being born when the marches start

Canada's commercial seal fishery opened at six in the morning on 8 April 2024. The International Day of Action Against Canadian Seal Slaughter had come and gone more than three weeks earlier.

That gap is the point. Harp seals give birth between late February and mid March, and the hunt has to wait for the pups.

Fisheries and Oceans Canada sets each opening by biology rather than by date, estimating the harp seal season from the point at which 80 percent of a colony's pups have been weaned. In 2024 Canadian sealers landed 31,000 harp seals, less than a tenth of the take twenty years earlier.

ORIGINS

International Day of Action Against Canadian Seal Slaughter history

INTRODUCTION

The campaign is older than the day. Brian Davies founded the International Fund for Animal Welfare in 1969, and Canada's commercial seal hunt was its first target.

Its first win came in Europe. The European Parliament voted for an import ban in 1982, and the following March the Council barred commercial imports of whitecoat and blueback pelts. Canada made selling a whitecoat illegal in 1987, and still the hunt grew: by 2004 the take had climbed to the highest level in the federal fisheries department's published series.

CHAPTER 01

A protest with no author

On 12 February 2005 a page went up on Harpseals.org under the heading WORLDWIDE PROTEST. It listed eight American cities for 15 March, with volunteer organisers named and several venues still marked TBA.

In early March, Friends of Animals announced its own protest outside the Canadian Consulate General in Manhattan. No source names who picked the date first.

CHAPTER 02

March 15, 2005

In Halifax, demonstrators carried letters and a petition to the constituency office of the fisheries minister, Geoff Regan, and found the doors locked. About 150 marched through a downtown Toronto square, and about the same number turned out on Parliament Hill.

In Paris they stood outside the Canadian embassy. A news photographer on Parliament Hill caught the day's real argument in a single frame: an anti-hunt protester beside an Inuit woman in a sealskin coat.

CHAPTER 03

The name came second

The observance had no settled name in its first year. In 2006 Harpseals.org headed its events page International Day of Action for the Seals, and by 2007 organisers were also calling it the World Day of Action Against the Seal Hunt.

The 2007 protests were staged at Canada's own front doors: Canada House on Trafalgar Square, the High Commission in Canberra, embassies from Dublin to Tel Aviv. Several were funerals. In Vancouver a procession ended at the fisheries department's building.

Harpseals.org is still campaigning today. Its redesigned site carries no Day of Action page, and its social feed has not named 15 March since the account opened in 2025.

WHY THIS DAY MATTERS

Why International Day of Action Against Canadian Seal Slaughter Matters

POPULATION

4.4 million seals, and the trend is downward.

The 2024 stock assessment puts the Northwest Atlantic harp seal population at 4.4 million animals, down from 5.6 million in 2019 and falling about 4.7 percent a year. Pup production measured in 2022 was the lowest since 1994.

TRADE

The campaign's real result was trade law

Europe has barred seal products from its market since 2009, and in 2014 the WTO Appellate Body upheld that ban as necessary to protect public morals. The same report found the EU had not justified the regime, because its exception for Inuit and indigenous hunts discriminated against Canadian and Norwegian products.

ICE

The pups need ice that is no longer reliable

Harp seals require stable ice for giving birth and rearing their young, and Canada's assessment expects predicted environmental change to depress the herd's vital rates. Its harvest projections assume ice conditions stay similar to those recently observed.

TIMELINE

Timeline

Europe bans seal pup pelts

Council Directive 83/129/EEC required member states to stop commercial imports of whitecoat harp seal and blueback hooded seal skins.

Canada bans whitecoat sales

The commercial harvesting of white-coated seal pups became illegal, and the Marine Mammal Regulations still bar selling or trading one.

The first documented day of action

On 15 March, protests were planned at Canadian consulates and embassies across dozens of countries, and the campaign made national news in Canada.

The day gets a name

Harpseals.org headed its events page International Day of Action for the Seals, the earliest use of the name found in the archive.

Protests reach Canada's embassies

Organisers listed demonstrations at Canadian diplomatic posts from Canberra to Belgrade, several of them staged as funerals.

The EU shuts its market

Regulation (EC) No 1007/2009 barred seal products from the European market except from hunts by Inuit and other indigenous communities.

BY THE NUMBERS

International Day of Action Against Canadian Seal Slaughter by the Numbers

30: Countries with protests planned, 2005
39: Events listed for the 2007 day
18: Countries on the 2007 events list
31: 2007 events falling on March 15

GOOD TO KNOW

Surprising facts about International Day of Action Against Canadian Seal Slaughter

Both sides reported the same kill

Friends of Animals told readers in 2005 that 365,971 seals had been killed the previous spring. Canada's own harvest table, rounded to the nearest thousand, gives 366,000 for 2004.

Most seal licences are never used

Fisheries and Oceans Canada counted about 4,160 commercial seal licence holders in 2024 and estimated that fewer than 500 sealers were active.

Canada's own scientists rejected the cod argument

The department found that harp seal predation was not a significant factor in the lack of cod recovery, and that harp seals are not primary drivers of cod abundance off Newfoundland.

The US Senate asked Canada to stop

S.Res.84, sponsored by Senator Carl Levin, was agreed to by unanimous consent on 7 May 2009, urging Canada to prohibit commercial seal hunting.

A whitecoat is a whitecoat for about three weeks

Pups begin to moult the white coat at around 10 days old and finish by three weeks. Selling one has been illegal in Canada since 1987.

We're asking Americans and people around the world not to buy Canadian fish and seafood products, which will be clearly labelled as that, until Canada has ended its commercial seal hunt for good.

Rebecca AldworthDirector of Canadian wildlife issues, the Humane Society

It's just complete harassment. It's not OK.

Tanya TagaqMusician, after posting a photograph of her baby beside a harvested seal in 2014

GET INVOLVED

How to Observe International Day of Action Against Canadian Seal Slaughter

Read the announcement that set the date

Friends of Animals published its call for the 15 March 2005 protest just under two weeks beforehand, and the piece explains the choice of date in the organisation's own words. It is the earliest primary record of the observance that survives online.

CHECK

Check the government's own harvest numbers

Fisheries and Oceans Canada publishes the annual harp and grey seal landings going back to 2002. Reading the table takes a minute and settles most arguments about the hunt's scale.

LOOK

Look up the current stock assessment

Canada's 2024 harp seal assessment sets out the abundance estimate, the decline rate and the reference points behind its harvest advice. Read the science advisory report before repeating a population figure from anywhere else.

HEAR

Hear the northern response

Inuit and other northerners answered anti-sealing campaigning in 2014 by posting photographs of themselves in sealskins under the hashtag sealfie. The objection is as old as the day: Nunavut environment minister Olayuk Akesuk said in 2005 that closing the commercial hunt would hurt people in the North.

SUPPORT

Support an organisation working on it

Harpseals.org and the International Fund for Animal Welfare both still run campaigns against the commercial hunt. Volunteering or donating goes further than a single day of posting.

Test your knowledge

How well do you know International Day of Action?

1 / 7

When did Canada's commercial seal fishery open in Newfoundland and Labrador in 2024?

Answer

No. It is an unofficial protest observance with no legal standing, and searches of the US Federal Register and the UK parliamentary record return nothing under its name.

COLOPHON

Sources

How we know what’s on this page. References, not endorsements.

18sources

16primary records

17independently dated

Primary records

Friends of Animals2005-03-02

Beware the Ides of March: The International Day of Protest Against Canada's Seal Hunt

The organisation's own call for the 15 March 2005 protest, with its reason for the date.