From its skin seal leather is made, but it is chiefly valuable for the oil yielded by the layer of fat lying directly beneath the skin and enveloping the entire body.

These seals would hardly be worth hunting unless they could be captured easily and in quantities; but, on their native ice in early spring, the young seals are found in prime condition and in vast numbers.

Each helpless victim is killed by a blow on the head, "sculped" or stripped of his pelt, and the flayed body is left lying in a pool of its own blood.
The crew of a single vessel will thus destroy thousands of seals in a day, and in some prosperous years the total kill of seals has passed the half million mark.

Now only about a dozen steamers are engaged in the business, but by them from 200,000 to 300,000 seals are destroyed each spring.

The movements of sealing vessels are governed by rigidly enforced laws that forbid them to leave port before the 12th of March, to kill a seal before the 14th of the same month, or after the 20th of April, and prohibit any steamer from making more than one trip during this short open season.