Seal hunting, or sealing, is the personal or commercial hunting of seals. Seal hunting is currently practiced in nine countries: United States, Canada, Namibia, Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Finland and Sweden. Most of the world's seal hunting takes place in Canada and Greenland.
Killing fur seals on St. Paul Island, Alaska Territory, 1890s
Seal skinning in the 1880s by members of the Nansen expedition to Greenland
Inuit seal hunting
Seal hunting in Reimerswaal
Pinnipeds, commonly known as seals, are a widely distributed and diverse clade of carnivorous, fin-footed, semiaquatic, mostly marine mammals. They comprise the extant families Odobenidae, Otariidae, and Phocidae, with 34 extant species and more than 50 extinct species described from fossils. While seals were historically thought to have descended from two ancestral lines, molecular evidence supports them as a monophyletic lineage. Pinnipeds belong to the suborder Caniformia of the order Carnivora; their closest living relatives are musteloids, having diverged about 50 million years ago.
Image: Pinniped collage
Image: Pinniped range
Restoration of Puijila
Fossil of Enaliarctos