OTTAWA (AFP) — Canada on Monday set a limit for its annual seal cull this year of 275,000 harp seals, and announced new rules to make the slaughter less cruel as well as curb international protests over the hunt.

The quota includes allocations of 2,000 seals for personal use and almost 5,000 seals for aboriginal hunters, as well as 16,000 seals carried over from last year for commercial fleets that did not capture their 2007 quota, fisheries officials said.

As well, Canada has adopted recommendations of the Independent Veterinarians Working Group to "ensure beyond any possible doubt that a seal is dead before it's skinned," said fisheries spokesman Phil Jenkins.

Its implementation comes just as the European Union weighs a ban on seal imports that could devastate the industry, but Jenkins denies being pushed into adopting the stricter killing method.

Rather, he said it took three years of consultations with sealers to vet the regulations, which start this year as a condition of holding a seal hunting license, and will appear in marine mammal regulations in 2009.

The new rules require hunters to check an animal's pupils for a blinking reflex, and to slit its main arteries under its flippers, after striking or shooting a seal.

"In almost all cases, the first strike of a hakapik (club) or a shot of a rifle is enough. But we want to make sure (it's dead)," Jenkins said.

In recent years, demonstrators in Europe and North America have denounced the "cruelty" of seal hunting.

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