CANADA stood firm in the face of international protests as it began an annual cull of baby seals over the weekend that will kill up to 325,000 pups. That will be the second-highest number in history.

Animal rights activists clashed with the hunters and used boats and helicopters to film the killing. There were calls for a boycott of Canadian goods in the US and Europe, but Stephen Harper, the Canadian Prime Minister, insisted that the hunt on the ice floes of the Canadian Atlantic coast would proceed.

He said that Canada was a victim of an international propaganda campaign, and that the slaughter was economically and environmentally justified. The Canadian Government has asserted that the cull is necessary to control seal numbers, saying that the seal population is approaching six million, nearly triple that of the 1970s.

The activists have brought in celebrities such as Sir Paul McCartney and his wife, Heather Mills McCartney, to draw attention to what the World Society for the Protection of Animals calls “the largest and cruellest slaughter of marine animal species found anywhere on the planet”.

The pictures are graphic. Hunters prefer to use spiked clubs to crush the seals’ skulls, rather than shooting them, which might damage the pelts with bullet holes. But fishermen in the isolated island communities of Quebec and Newfoundland say that the hunt supplements their meagre winter incomes, particularly because cod stocks have dwindled substantially in the past decade.

Mark Small, who has been sealing for 40 years, said: “I think the Canadian public realises these are coastal people who live off the sea and depend on the hunt to survive in small communities, where the fish stocks are not there.”

The hunt produced the equivalent of £8.3 million in revenue last year. Fishermen sell the pelts, mostly for the fashion industry, in Norway, Russia and China, and their blubber for oil, earning about £34 a seal. They resent the activists, asserting that they have little understanding of their traditions.

There have been some ugly clashes. A sealing vessel sped up to a small inflatable boat carrying protesters and the hunters hurled seal guts at them.

Rebecca Aldworth, of the Humane Society of the United States, said: “This is standard behaviour out here. The sealers feel that they’re completely above the law.” The pups are born on the ice and nursed for two weeks, after which their mothers abandon them.

In the early 1980s protesters achieved international condemnation of the cull with pictures of the youngest pups, with their white fluffy fur, being slaughtered. The pups must now be two to three weeks old and have shed their white coat before they can be killed.

Sally Stratford, the widow of Tony Banks, the Labour minister, is leading a campaign to persuade leading British supermarkets to boycott Canadian goods.

Ann Widdecombe, MP and former Tory minister, has also written to retailers urging a boycott, and 188 MPs have signed an Early Day Motion to support a boycott.

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