Feds: Leave the harbor seal pup alone, starving or otherwise

While listening to an animal howl in agony all night seems unbearable, the National Marine Fisheries Service is warning people to leave a seemingly abandoned harbor seal pup alone.

Brandy Garcia has a waterfront home about 5 miles north of Olympia and has been listening to the pup crying.

She says she sees other mothers feed their pups but not this one.

“That’s where their mothers put them when they go out in the water to forage for fish to stay healthy and be able to nurse their pups,” Brian Gorman, spokesman with the National Marine Fisheries Service explains to KIRO Radio. “Interfering with that almost guarantees that the pup is not going to survive.”

Susanne Beauregard, director of Thurston County Animal Services, tells MyNorthwest her agency wanted to help, but she received a call from animal services Friday morning saying federal authorities had told it to “stand down” and there was nothing it could do.

“It’s horrible. Mother Nature is a cruel witch,” she she says.

But Beauregard says as painful as it is seeing the seal pup seemingly stranded, she understands in this case the situation prohibits anyone from taking action.

“Extending compassion still requires thought. It can’t be as impulsive as we’d like.”

But Gorman says the pup looks healthy.

“It’s going in and out of the water. It’s doing things that pups do on land. It may in fact, have been visited by its mother in the past week,” says Gorman.

As hard as it is to watch, it’s normal for about half the 3,000 to 5,000 harbor seals born in Puget Sound to die before they are a year old.

“Even if we wanted to ‘rescue it,’ doing so would spook other pups and adults in the same location, and so it would be a stupid idea,” says Gorman.

There are other good reasons not to touch seal pups.

“We don’t know no mother is feeding it. It hasn’t been monitored 24-7,” says Gorman. “Mothers may nurse at night. She may be at the point where her pup should be weaned, at which point it will be left and it will figure out for itself to go into the water and forage or it won’t.”

Human intervention would be a mistake, says Gorman. He adds that harbor seals have spent thousands of years working on their breeding strategy.

“Unless there is some human-caused injury, like being caught in net or shot, it just doesn’t make ecological sense to interfere in what is a natural evolutionary process,” says Gorman.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.