CAP-AUX-MEULES, Canada (AFP) - Canada's annual seal hunt kicked off Friday, touting for the first time more humane killing methods that failed to sway animal rights groups.

Canada set the limit for this year's harvest at 275,000 harp seals, and adopted Independent Veterinarians Working Group recommendations to make the slaughter less cruel and curb international protests over the hunt.

"Unfortunately, I think this year's hunt will be 'business as usual' here in Canada," Sheryl Fink, a veteran seal hunt observer with the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), said in statement.

"I don't expect to see any improvement in the way animals are killed, or in the way this hunt is monitored," she said.

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 clubbing or shooting a seal, officials said.

The regulations are meant to ensure that hunted seals are dead before they are skinned on the ice, and starting this year are a condition of holding a seal hunting license.

But Fink said competing sealers face "unpredictable conditions" such as shifting ice, high winds, freezing temperatures and unpredictable seas -- "all of which make it extremely difficult to execute a so-called 'humane' kill."

In Cap-Aux-Meules, a tiny village in the Magdalen Islands on Canada's Atlantic Coast, several vessels set off for the hunt in the early morning but had not yet reached the seal herds.

Ice up to 70 centimeters (27.5 inches) thick on the Gulf of Saint Lawrence slowed their 30-mile (48-kilometer) trip, Denis Longuepee, president of the local sealers' association, told AFP.

One vessel was even forced to return to port after being slammed by huge chunks of ice, he said.

Phil Jenkins, a spokesman for Canada's fisheries department, confirmed: "It's been a very slow start."

"As of this morning, a grand total of three seals have been killed," he said, later updating that figure to possibly 15.

Sealers from this Canadian archipelago are allowed to slaughter as many as 15,000 seals this year. The hunt will then move in April to the coasts of Newfoundland, where the vast majority of the harp seals squat.

Animal rights groups protested Friday that permits were not issued in time for them to observe the start of the hunt. But Canada's fisheries department said almost 50 were eventually accredited.

In recent years, demonstrators and celebrities, including the Dalai Lama, pop icon Paul McCartney, French film legend Brigitte Bardot and Canadian-born actress and former Playboy model Pamela Anderson have campaigned against seal hunting.

A Connecticut businesswoman even offered sealers 16 million dollars (Canadian, US) -- the estimated value of commercial seal meat and pelts for thousands of local fisherman -- to end the killings.

Ottawa maintains the hunt poses no threat to the harp seal population, and insists the commercial cull is an economic mainstay of its Atlantic Coast communities.

"Our government works hard to ensure the Canadian seal hunt is conducted in a humane, safe and sustainable manner," Fisheries Minister Loyola Hearn said in a statement.

"We will not be bullied or blackmailed into forcing people who depend on the sealing industry out of their livelihood based on things that are simply baseless allegations," he said of "extremist" animal rights groups' protests.

Canada banned the killing of the youngest seals, less than 12 days old, in 1987 amid criticisms and threats of European boycotts that pushed the industry to the brink of collapse.

Last month, Belgium and the Netherlands banned the import of seal-derived products and Germany and Austria are said to be considering closing their markets too.

Implementation of the new humane killing rules also comes just as the European Union weighs a total ban on seal imports that could devastate the industry.

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