A few days ago, our president announced the end of the State of Emergency for Namibia. The Corona lock down regulations had restricted us to our seal rescue site at Pelican Point, but just about 150km North of Walvis Bay is a place called Cape Cross. Cape Cross is home to over 400.000 Cape Fur Seals, much more than we get at Pelican Point. Now that we can travel freely within Namibia again for the first time since March 2020, we packed the kids and did a scouting trip to Cape Cross to assess the entanglement situation.

Cape Cross is a tourist hot spot in Namibia. Seals are so used to tourists, they don't mind human presence at all. There is a fenced off walkway right through the seal colony to give people the opportunity to observe Cape Fur Seals in their natural habitat without interfering with the seals - and that walkway was perfect for us! We could get within touching distance to the animals before they ran away. It took us less than an hour to spot 17 seals with entanglement!!!

We did not intend to do any rescues on that day, but two seals needed immediate help and Naude quickly jumped over the fence and grabbed them. We attempted a third seal rescue, but he was too big to be rescued without the seal rescue net. He will have to wait for our next trip to Cape Cross.

Cape Cross is unfortunately also famous for the very controversial annual "seal harvest" also known as "cull" or "seal slaughter". The Namibian government issues a quota each year for the killing of up to 80.000 seals (seal bulls and seal pups) to protect fish stocks and to control the size of the seal colonies. We normally know when the cull has started - many seals flee from Cape Cross and seek refuge at Pelican Point and we can see an immediate increase in numbers. The reserve at Cape Cross stays closed in the morning hours during the slaughter. So far, we have not seen more seals than usual at Pelican Point, and we were able to visit Cape Cross early in the morning. We take it as a good sign that the cull has not started and might not happen at all in 2020. 

When we started OCN, we were "worried" that seal entanglements are not enough to keep our NGO busy. Almost 500 seal rescues for 2020 later, we barely find the time to think about the way forward. We need policy changes to prevent seal entanglements from happening in the first place. We are not scientists ourselves, but we are happy to hand over our data regarding seal entanglements to anyone who is willing to put our situation into scientific context, so that we can work on a sustainable solution. We will make all our data available on our website by the end of the year, and hopefully we will move forward from there.

Thank you very much for supporting us!

Katja & Naude & The OCN Team