Fur seals

I’m turning back to reading about actual treaties for while. Currently I’m reading about the background to the North Pacific Fur Seal Convention, which, for reasons I won’t bore people with at the moment, I think might be a useful case.

In the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, the population of the large Alaskan fur seal colony dropped from around 5 million to around 120,000. This was due in large part to pelagic sealing; that is, sealing carried out in the ocean from ships, largely by other nations such as Britain/Canada. The US, which owned the land on which the seals lived and bred, had the motivation and capacity to husband this resource by restricting hunting – as long as the seals stayed on land. But the US had no control over the seals when they were in the open ocean, where they fed. Sealing in the ocean quickly descended into a classic tragedy of the commons situation. And with the seal population dropping rapidly and not under its control, even the US, which otherwise preferred to husband this resource, had incentives to maximize its share of the dwindling resource by hunting as rapidly as possible on land.

The international community attempted a number of rounds of solutions to this, and it took quite a while to find one that worked in a lasting way.

The first multilateral solution was an attempt to control destructive sealing by introducing a set of regulations, created by a European arbitration court, that limited the season during which seals could be hunted (banning hunting between May and July – since hunting was impractical during the long Alaskan winter, this effectively limited hunting to August, September, and parts of October), and limited the weapons with which they could be hunted (no firearms).

Both of these probably looked like good ideas when they were enacted (many hunting restrictions limit hunting to a restricted period in the fall; firearms are more effective killers and thus banning them should reduce kill sizes).

Both turned out to actually accelerate the depletion of the seal herds. The months of August, September, and October are the months during which female seals care for their pups, going out into the open ocean repeatedly to hunt and returning to feed pups. Concentrating hunting during the fall meant an absolute slaughter of these female seals; and each female killed on the ocean counted double or triple because pups left behind were unable to care for themselves and died. And while pelagic sealers had originally used firearms to hunt, once these were banned, they discovered that spears were actually more effective. Firearms discharges would scare seal herds away, but spears were quiet and hunters could go on killing without causing widespread flight.

What’s the lesson? Pick your poison:

1) Regulation is never the answer. Externally imposed solutions are typically stupid because they are typically promulgated by people who aren’t part of the activity in question and don’t fully understand it.

2) We should regulate but do so slowly, after months or years of careful study. Moving quickly means making mistakes that may cost is more than waiting would, while moving slowly allows us to do things like study the cycles of seal life to determine what kinds of restrictions would be most effective.

3) We should move quickly to experiment with solutions (regulatory and otherwise). Mistakes are unavoidable - how could we have known that banning firearms wouldn't be effective until we tried it? - and therefore we need to be aware that a period of unproductive or limited-productivity experimentation is inevitable.