Evidence of meeting #13 for Fisheries and Oceans in the 39th Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was seals.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Gerald Keddy
I call the meeting to order.
Our witnesses are not quite ready yet, so I'll give them a few seconds. I know that Mr. Stoffer and Mr. Cummins had interventions. Maybe we can deal with them while the witnesses are preparing themselves.
Before we do, I welcome our witnesses, Dr. Alice Crook and Dr. Charles Caraguel.
Now you can finish your business. Mr. Stoffer.
NDP
Peter Stoffer NDP Sackville—Eastern Shore, NS
Yes, Mr. Chair. I'd like to advise the committee of a notice of motion, so that at the next meeting of the Standing Committee on Fisheries and Oceans, we can have a vote and debate it. The motion will deal with coast guard fees north of 60, the marine service fees. I have a copy of the motion in French and English at the clerk's desk, and he will be sending it out to you for your perusal and consideration. At the next committee meeting, we can move, debate, or discuss and vote on that motion.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Gerald Keddy
Thank you, Mr. Stoffer. I will remind you that the next meeting is after we return from the week at home. The minister was to appear at committee, so we may want to move the notice of motion to a different meeting.
Conservative
John Cummins Conservative Delta—Richmond East, BC
Mr. Chairman, we had requested a couple of reports to be done by the Library of Parliament. I was wondering about the status of the spawn on kelp report, and if there was going to be some timeframe in which we could expect that report.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Gerald Keddy
I'm going to ask François. I'm not sure of the status of the report.
François Côté Committee Researcher
I will be doing it for the library. In the past couple weeks, I have been busy with the briefing material for the current meeting and the seal hunt trip. I'll try to do my best to start on these next week during recess week. We can discuss a timeline or a deadline later on.
Bloc
Gérard Asselin Bloc Manicouagan, QC
Mr. Chairman, at the last meeting, I undertook to table some documents. You will recall that some hunters in my riding, on the North Shore, wanted a hunting licence for recreational seal hunting. They took the firearms handling and seal hunting courses, but the department unfortunately does not want to give them the licence because of a moratorium. They want the department to give them a recreational seal hunting licence and a contract for two or three seals per year. I told you I had written to the minister and received a reply.
For the benefit of all committee members, given that fact that seals are part of our work, allow me to table with the clerk the letter I wrote to the minister and his reply. I took the trouble of having my letter translated into English.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Gerald Keddy
Thank you, Monsieur Asselin.
If we could proceed, I think our witnesses are ready.
Dr. Alice Crook Coordinator, Sir James Dunn Animal Welfare Centre, Atlantic Veterinary College, University of Prince Edward Island and member of the Animal Welfare Committee of the Canadian Veterinary Medical Association, Independant Veterinarians' Working Group
Good morning, and thank you for inviting us to speak to you. We're both members of the Independent Veterinarians' Working Group. I'm also a member of the animal welfare committee of the Canadian Veterinary Medical Association.
I'm going to start the presentation by giving you a bit of background on the seal hunt. Some of it will be more or less familiar to some of you, but I'll give you a bit of background on some of the framework for the questions that we've asked in assessing the seal hunt and veterinarian involvement in it, and the composition of the Independent Veterinarians' Working Group. Then Dr. Caraguel will talk about the specific recommendations of the report.
Many of the pictures here were provided by our colleague, Dr. Pierre-Yves Daoust, who is currently in Rotterdam. In regard to these pictures before you, the one on the left was taken in the gulf and the one on the right is at the front in 2002.
The harp seal, which is the one we're talking about, is also called the Greenland seal or saddleback seal, and you can see the adult has that typical saddleback pattern. There are two extensive whelping areas in Canada. One is called the gulf, which is in the Magdalen Islands area, and the other is called the front, off the coast of Newfoundland. The arrows show the migration patterns. The big red splotches are the whelping areas where the seal hunt takes place.
The annual population estimations are done by quite precise transect surveys on pup production. We won't get into that here, but here is a lot of very good detailed information on the population.
This shows the development of the seal pups from very young, just a few hours old, to the whitecoats that are just a few days old--they are, of course, no longer hunted--to the ragged jackets at the age of a few weeks. Then by the age of about a month, they are called beaters. It is the beaters that now represent 90% of the commercial hunt. They're called beaters by the time they're about three or four weeks old. By that time, they will have been weaned for a week or more. This particular seal was probably eight months old or so, and that picture was taken on the north shore of P.E.I.
The picture on the right shows the gulf in 2001.
There's extensive regulation of the seal hunt. As you know, the hunting of whitecoats has been banned since about the late seventies. In 2006 there was a quota of 325,000 total, including 10,000 for natives, and 92,000, plus or minus a certain number, were taken in the gulf and 232,000 at the front, plus a little bit extra beyond that. According to the population surveys, the replacement yield is about 255,000 per year, so we are actually taking more than the replacement yield.
The Canadian harp seal population is arguably among the best-managed populations of wild animals in the world. It's surveyed every five years based on pup production by those grid methods. The methods of killing are the hakapik and rifles. The main point of contention is the humaneness of the hunt. That's what the Independent Veterinarians' Working Group was formed to look at.
The picture on the lower right--I'm sure you all recognize it--is Sir Paul McCartney and his wife, Heather, who spent several days on P.E.I. this spring.
It is the largest seal hunt in the world, and it's competitive and very quick. It takes place over only a few days. That shows numbers that were landed from 1951 to 2002. There was a dip, as you can see, and that was when there was an EU ban on whitecoats. But in recent years, it has rebounded with an increase in prices for the pelts.
I have a few slides about why veterinarians are involved in looking at this.
Most people accept that animals will be used by people for medical research, for food, as pets, in farming, and in hunting. The goal for all animals that we use is for them to have a good life and a gentle death. The big question is whether this is compatible with the seal hunt. We look at specific questions: can seals be killed humanely by the methods that are used? If so, are the sealers using these methods correctly to achieve this--always, most of the time, or seldom? Because we're concerned not only about the individual seals but also about the health of the population, what is the effect of the hunt on the seal population?
Veterinary involvement in looking at welfare issues of the hunt goes back a long way. There were veterinarians involved in observations in the mid-sixties and early seventies. The Canadian Veterinary Medical Association undertook observations in 1979 to 1984 and now since 1998. Dr. Daoust, whom I mentioned, has been involved in most of those recent observations. Dr. Caraguel has been involved for the last two years in observations.
The third group listed is the International Fund for Animal Welfare veterinarians, whose observations were made in 2001. This group was brought together by IFAW. Then there's the Independent Veterinarians' Working Group, which was brought together in 2005 and is still functional.
What are the outcomes of the years of observation? We've regularly provided input into a review of the marine mammal regulations by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans. An article called “Animal Welfare and the Harp Seal Hunt in Atlantic Canada” was written; Pierre-Yves Daoust is the primary author, and I'm the second author. You have a copy of that article; there are some in French and some in English.
The importance of this article is that it sums up all the observations that preceded it. That's important because many of these were in the form of internal reports, so it provides public access to this information. It also talks about the findings from the recent observations. Dr. Daoust and I reviewed a lot of the videotapes from IFAW with which we were provided. The information on our review of those tapes is included as well.
We're mostly here to talk about the Independent Veterinarians' Working Group report, but I also brought copies of the position statement of the Canadian Veterinary Medical Association on the hunt. It is really quite similar to the report in that it calls for sealers to check by palpation that the skull is crushed, and it also states that if done properly, killing the seal with a hakapik is a humane and efficient method of killing them. As I said, it reinforces what is in the IVWG report.
I want to spend a minute or two talking about these two reports, because the figures from them are commonly quoted. The first one, by Daoust et al., from the Canadian Veterinary Journal, concluded that 98% of seals are killed in an acceptably humane manner and that the killing methods are appropriate for the species and age groups harvested when properly used, but that if even 2% of 325,000 seals are not killed properly, it's still a significant number, so there's room for improvement.
The veterinarians' report put out by the International Fund for Animal Welfare, which is on their website and is very widely quoted, most recently in the European Union declaration, says that up to 42% of seals whose skin carcasses were examined were likely conscious when skinned. They conclude that there are many instances of violations on the videotapes, and they say that the hunt is unacceptably inhumane.
So there's obviously conflicting information in those two reports. I think there are a couple of reasons for that. The first report is based on years of observations, and that includes both direct observations on the ice and also a review of the videotapes provided by the International Fund for Animal Welfare. The second one was created by this group of five veterinarians who came together only very briefly and were on the ice for two days. They produced the report as a result of those two days, plus the viewing of videotapes—many of which were the same ones we viewed.
Another difference is that no one in their group was a veterinary pathologist, whereas the other group included at least two, and I think three, veterinary pathologists. When they examined skulls, they didn't have the facilities to take them back to a lab, take them apart, and look for brain injuries.
The first report was based on very thorough post-mortem examinations, including looking for hemorrhage within the brain, even if there weren't growths, and obvious crushing injuries to the skull. So I believe that's a big part of the reason for the difference in the conclusions.
The other thing is that the first one was a peer-reviewed study, published in the Canadian Veterinary Journal, and the second one was not peer-reviewed and published only on a website. So there's a lot of difference between the studies, but they're both quoted.
This is a sealer with a hakapik and a seal in the gulf—he's a seal killer, yes. While there's no doubt that striking a seal on the head with a hakapik to kill it appears brutal—it's a brutal act—if it achieves irreversible unconsciousness and rapid death, then it is a humane method of killing the animals.
There are two very important concepts to the discussion of the humaneness of the hunt. I'm going to talk about them both briefly. The first is that the skull of young seals is very thin. On the left, you have the skull of a dog and on the right of a harp seal. You can see that the dog has a sagittal crest, and a lot of mammals do—more land-living mammals—but the seal skull is quite thin. In fact it is crushed very easily.
The next slide shows pictures of two skulls with damage done by the hakapik. The first one shows the top of the skull, and you can see that there's a lot of fractures. Where the bone's fractured, it isn't actually crushed, but there's still a lot of damage.
The second one shows the floor, the lower part of the brain, and the arrows point to some of the fractures. Again, there's a lot of damage there.
One thing that's very important about this is that it's very easy for the sealer to feel if the skull is crushed, just by reaching down with a gloved hand and feeling if the skull has been crushed. In both the IVWG report and the CVMA position statement, that's why they both say this is how it should be monitored: that the sealer checks for a crushed skull. The other thing about this is that it's easy to see. If you're observing from a bit of a distance, you can see if the sealer has reached down to check with his hand or not. So it's easy to monitor.
The other important concept is the swimming reflex, which is involuntary movement, equivalent to the paddling movements of livestock that would be seen in an abattoir when the animal's been hit with a stun gun. In the case of the seal, it's vigorous lateral movements of the hind end of the animal. It can last longer than in terrestrial animals, because they have much longer oxygen stores in their muscles than diving mammals.
But it is difficult to tell at a distance, especially with an untrained eye, what that movement means. Certainly for anyone who doesn't have a lot of knowledge in this area, any movement looks like a result of the animal being conscious and alive. So obviously that's very important in this whole discussion.
The next thing I'm going to talk a little bit about is the Independent Veterinarians' Working Group. It was formed partly in response to the international scrutiny and criticism of Canada's seal hunt, which has, as you all know, increased a lot in the last couple of years, and because of very strong criticism by animal rights groups, IFAW, and the Humane Society of the United States. The goal was to assess the hunting practices--do current practices minimize or eliminate animal suffering, is the available knowledge sufficient?--and to provide recommendations for changes in practice and/or for additional research, if necessary.
The funding for this meeting and for bringing together the group came from the World Wildlife Fund in the Netherlands, which is interesting in itself. It was very expensive to arrange to have these people come together for three or four days and to pay for the resources that were all brought together in Halifax, and it was all funded by the World Wildlife Fund in the Netherlands.
It started when Pierre-Yves Daoust and I were asked by the World Wildlife Fund to convene a panel of veterinarians, with relevant expertise, who were not related to industry or non-governmental organizations or anything. The group has nine members--four from Canada, two from the U.S., and one each from the Netherlands, France, and Great Britain. I'm just going to tell you who they are so you'll have a sense of the cumulative expertise of this group.
The first is Dr. Caraguel, who is originally from France but is now a graduate student at the Atlantic Veterinary College. He is doing his work in the area of aquatic animals, and he's been an observer at the seal hunt for the last two years.
I have been involved with assessing the seal hunt, because of my association with the Canadian Veterinary Medical Association, since 1997, and I'm also with the Sir James Dunn Animal Welfare Centre at the Atlantic Veterinary College.
Pierre-Yves Daoust has been observing the seal hunt for many years now. He's a wildlife pathologist at the Atlantic Veterinary College.
Larry Dunn is the next one. He's the director of animal health research and veterinary services at the Mystic Aquarium and Institute for Exploration in Connecticut. He's the author of dozens of papers on marine mammal health issues, and he is past-president of the International Association of Aquatic Animal Medicine.
Stéphane Lair is also from Canada. He's the assistant professor of zoological medicine at the Faculté de médecine vétérinaire, Université de Montréal.
Al Longair is also from Canada. He's a small-animal practitioner, but he was one of the members of the 2001 IFAW veterinary panel. That's kind of interesting, because he brings both perspectives. I think he's been drummed out of that group by now, actually.
Joost Philippa is from the Netherlands. He is a veterinarian with clinical experience doing post mortems on seals and rehabilitation projects with marine mammals.
The next one is Andrew Routh, who is from the U.K. He's a senior veterinary officer with the Zoological Society of London, with more than 10 years of experience working with zoos and wildlife and doing seal medicine, rehabilitation, and release in the U.K. and in the U.S.
The last one is Allison Tuttle, who has practised aquatic animal medicine with a focus on marine mammals. She is also at the Mystic Aquarium in Connecticut.
I'll talk a bit about the process. The group was brought together. On the first day, we met with a number of people representing different aspects of the Canadian harp seal hunt to get a better understanding of some of the perspectives of the different individuals and groups. We had presentations on population biology; the industry, past, present, and future; hunting methods; management; and enforcement. They involved sealers, scientists, and DFO managers.
I just have a comment. For me it was very interesting, because even though I've been involved with the seal hunt for years, I've not actually spoken to sealers before. There were three sealers, one from the Magdalen Islands and two from Newfoundland, and it was really very interesting to hear their perspectives.
Sealing is hard and dangerous work, and it represents a significant source of their annual income. They are genuinely perplexed by the amount of international scrutiny that descends on them for a very brief period in the spring, so they told the group they would welcome any assistance in making the hunt more humane.
For the next two days we met in camera with a facilitator and discussed the hunt, looked at videotapes, and developed recommendations. Then over the summer we prepared the report. Dr. Caraguel will now talk about the specific recommendations in it.
Dr. Charles Caraguel Department of Health Management and Centre for Aquatic Health Sciences, Atlantic Veterinary College, University of Prince Edward Island, Independent Veterinarians' Working Group
):
Mr. Chairman, members, good morning.
I'm going to switch my speech from English to French to apologize for the fact that although e do have a French version, but we don't have it here on the laptop. So I'll switch to French.
The Independent Veterinarians Working Group on the Greenland seal hunt has reported a total of 11 recommendations, four specific and seven general.
The first specific recommendation refers to a three-step seal killing process to be carried out in sequence as rapidly as possible. The three steps are stunning, checking and bleeding the animal. The purpose of the first step, stunning, is to cause an irreversible loss of consciousness and death. The two methods used are rifle and hakapik or club. All of the specifications on the use of both weapons are found in the Department of Fisheries and Oceans marine mammal regulations.
One of the first problems, as Dr. Crook mentioned, is the conflict between IFAW veterinarians and the article published by veterinarians in the Canadian Veterinary Journal in 2002. Watching the same events and videos, the IFAW found 55 violations out of a total of 116 observations, whereas Pierre-Yves D'Aoust and Alice Crook, together, agreed on only 27 of those 55 violations. That difference of opinion over the same images stems from the problem of interpretation of the swimming reflex.
Is the swimming reflex fact or fiction? It is defined as a stereotyped, disordered and lateral movement of the seal's hind end. It is an involuntary movement. It is often compared to the paddling movements of livestock killed in laboratories with a stun gun.
The video was shot by IFAW members during the 2001 Gulf hunt. It shows a young beacher trying to escape and being fired on by a hunting boat. After 10 seconds of immobility, the seal begins to display completely irregular and involuntary lateral movements. That is the swimming reflex, and the animal feels nothing and does not suffer at all. The swimming reflex lasts over 15 seconds, and certainly far longer. That is what it's all about.
This swimming reflex is supposed to be a medulary reflex, not a cerebral reflex, i.e., it does not go through the spinal cord. Given that this was merely a hypothesis, we wanted to put the theory to the test in the field, expecting to find that the duration and amplitude of the swimming reflex were independent of brain integrity. So there was no connection between the medulary reflex and brain integrity. The methods used were observational and qualitative methods.
In 2005, Dr. D'Aoust and myself took a helicopter to the area of the hunt. We boarded a hunting boat. We observed how many hakapik blows the animal received and whether or not there was any swimming reflex and how long it lasted. Finally, once the animal was brought on board, we were able to observe skull and brain integrity.
The results showed that out of 63 detailed observations, 36 of the seals, or over 57 per cent, displayed a swimming reflex. The duration of the swimming reflex was on average nine seconds, ranging from two to 35 seconds. In addition, of the 63 skulls examined, 51 showed severe injury, 11 showed partial injury and one showed minimum injury.
The case of skull no. 28, which presented minimum injury, involved left jaw and muzzle fractures. In addition, a small piece of the frontal bone was detached from the right orbit. One might think that the hakapik blow connected only with the muzzle and that the brain case was perfectly intact. However, closer inspection of the brain revealed a diffuse sub-durable hemorrhage in the left hemisphere and ventral surface of the brain, which means the animal was certainly in a state of irreversible unconsciousness or perhaps even death.
Let's come back to the discussion of our findings. So you can see that the swimming reflex is a common phenomenon during the hunt and is unrelated to brain integrity—it is definitely a medullary reflex—but also that the hakapik appears to be an effective method for killing or, at the very least, producing irreversible unconsciousness of the seal.
Another problem, which is part of the discussion around stunning the animals, is the calibre of rifle used. In 2004, Pierre-Yves D'Aoust and Marc Cattet did a ballistics report comparing use of the 22 magnum and 22-250 calibre.
I have that report here. Perhaps someone might like to take down the information and distribute it among committee members.
The report first describes the case of an animal being hit directly in the brain. So two seal heads with direct hits to the brain are compared. Both calibres hit the mark by causing severe injury to the brain.
However, if you take the case of a muzzle hit, the 22 magnum does not cause enough injury to debilitate the seal brain, except perhaps for a minimum fracture of the frontal bone, whereas the 22-250 calibre completely damages a whole part of the muzzle, in addition to causing fractures and severe injury to the brain.
This study was done at the request of hunters who wanted to reconsider using the 22 magnum during the hunt. Following the report, the Department of Fisheries and Ocean disallowed the use of this calibre and continued to allow more powerful calibres.
During the observations in 2006 at the font, off the shores of Labrador, I had the opportunity to take part in an observation session aboard one of the Coast Guard icebreakers, the Henry Larsen, and I followed officers from Fisheries and Ocean Canada who were monitoring the hunt. The hakapik is not used much at the front; they use rifles instead. As you can see from this image, the hunters are quite happy to be monitored.
During the first inspection where I was present, we had—fortunately or unfortunately—a case of an animal that was still alive and suffering on the boat. The officer asked the hunters to finish the animal off with a regulated weapon. Unfortunately, there was no hakapik on board; there was just this piece of wood that had apparently been used in the past to finish an animal off and that was not included in the regulations.
The two officers present began an investigation. They discovered that the hunters on this boat were not using the right calibre, they were using 22 Magnums, which are not included in the marine mammal regulations.
So we took samples of seal skulls from this case of violation. We took dorsal and ventral, right and left photos. Here, this is just one case. You can see that this skull is perfectly intact and that there are only two small injuries to the upper jaw. That means that the trajectory of the bullet clearly went through the muzzle.
We tried to find out whether this mussel had been hit by a 22 Magnum calibre bullet. By doing an X-ray, we found no bullet in the skull. In this case, we therefore cannot ascertain whether the animal was hit by a 22 Magnum or another calibre authorized by the regulations, such as a 222 calibre. That is why, as an independent veterinarian group, we want to go further and are calling for a ballistic field study of the 22 Magnum.
The second specific recommendation has to do with checking. The purpose of checking is to confirm irreversible loss of consciousness or death. Previously, what was checked for was the absence of a corneal reflex, which is a very difficult reflex to apply and interpret. Our group asked that this check be replaced by palpation of the skull, which anyone can do. Right through the animal's skin, it is easy to feel whether the skull is damaged or not.
The third step of the process is bleeding. When an animal is in a state of irreversible unconsciousness, bleeding will cause it to die. This is a very important step in our killing process. We have called for the marine mammal regulations to stipulate that bleeding should occur after irreversible unconsciousness rather than after death, because bleeding causes death.
The last specific recommendation has to do with shooting animals in the water. A lot of animals are shot in the water. According to the report of one of the scientists from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, the carcasses are often lost in a region that is not of concern to Canada, but is of concern to the island of Greenland.
Through my observations in 2006, I have found that animals very rarely sink and can often be recovered, even after being shot in the water. This recommendation will definitely be revisited in the next report.
Let's move on to the general recommendations, of which there are seven. The first general recommendation has to do with managing the hunt so as to reduce competition and haste.
We are also calling on the Department of Fisheries and Oceans to improve supervision, monitoring and enforcement of the hunt.
We would also like the industry to seriously consider striving for full utilization of each seal killed.
We would like hunters to join together and form a professional organization to promote appropriate treatment of the animals.
We hope that observers and researchers will cooperate with hunters with a view to fully understanding the impact and importance of the hunt in coastal communities.
We recommend training and education for sealers, as well as regularly updated information. That should be available and required for a hunting licence. The training could use video footage to illustrate the right ways and the wrong ways of doing things.
Finally, we would like research and observations to be updated regularly, for example, to better understand the swimming reflex.
As part of this work and the discussion, in the near future, the group would like to set up a ballistic study of the use of 223 and 222 calibre rifles in the field, and promote training and education for sealers. For example, during the hunt, the three essential steps to killing an animal could be printed on a laminated poster that sealers would have on their boats.
We also want to revisit the issue of area 4, where use of the hakapik is not required for reasons having to do with Aboriginal people. We want the use of the hakapik to be mandatory in this area.
We want to organize a new task force workshop in order to make a new report.
Finally, we wish to remain open to any opportunity to observe, improve or alter the appropriate treatment of animals during the seal hunt.
I indicated here our group's Internet link. You can access our report in English or in French.
If you have any questions, Dr. Crook and myself would be more than delighted to answer them.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Gerald Keddy
Merci beaucoup, Monsieur Caraguel and Dr. Crook. It was a very good presentation. I'm sure our members have lots of questions.
Just before we go to questions, I want to thank you for the presentation--the thoroughness and breadth of it. You covered, I think, all the issues we've been discussing at this committee for some time.
We'll move on to questions. We'll have Mr. MacAulay.
Liberal
Lawrence MacAulay Liberal Cardigan, PE
Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
Thank you, Dr. Caraguel and Dr. Crook, for coming.
The biggest problem we seem to have with the seal hunt is the perception of cruelty. Part of what you explained here was that there were, I believe, 61 cases in one area, and there was one that wasn't properly hit with the hakapik. You indicated, Doctor, that the animal was unconscious and could not regain life. But the problem we have as a group and as a committee is that the people watching are horrified. And mostly what you've explained to us is that it's totally humane and done in a proper manner.
The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe wants the hakapik eliminated. What we are trying to do as a committee is explain to the world that in fact we have one of the most humane and necessary hunts. I believe you're involved in health research. What would happen if we did not have a seal hunt? What would happen to the seal population? Perhaps either one of you could answer that.
It's a problem. We're going to travel. We're going to meet people in the European Union. The problem we have, as a parliamentary committee, is what is shown here or what the International Fund for Animal Welfare and other groups put up and what people see. I wonder what difference it would make if you took them into a slaughterhouse where a young steer was being taken in and the same thing was done.
We have a big job to do, but if we don't accomplish some of what we're trying to do, this hunt could be in jeopardy, and that would be serious, I believe.
Would you like to respond to that?
Coordinator, Sir James Dunn Animal Welfare Centre, Atlantic Veterinary College, University of Prince Edward Island and member of the Animal Welfare Committee of the Canadian Veterinary Medical Association, Independant Veterinarians' Working Group
I have a couple of comments. One of the things that happens.... As you know, the IFAW and the HSUS take a lot of video footage. They definitely capture footage of infractions. A lot of it is in question, but there is some that isn't.
If you invite representatives of those groups, you'll probably see the one that was taken last year, which we have not actually seen--we requested a copy but haven't received one. Pierre-Yves Daoust was shown it when he was in Europe, and he said that it definitely shows infractions.
There are some problems, for sure. But we feel that if this procedure of stunning and checking of the skulls by palpation was adopted, and it was seen that it was being monitored, and if on these videotapes that IFAW was showing you could see that the sealer was palpating the skull, then it could be defended that, yes, they're following the steps they're supposed to. But currently they're not doing that.
That's one way, we think, of helping to improve the perception of the hunt, that they're following all the steps that are laid out in the marine mammal regulations.
Liberal
Lawrence MacAulay Liberal Cardigan, PE
But what you've explained, if I interpreted it properly, is that most of what takes place is done in a humane manner.
Coordinator, Sir James Dunn Animal Welfare Centre, Atlantic Veterinary College, University of Prince Edward Island and member of the Animal Welfare Committee of the Canadian Veterinary Medical Association, Independant Veterinarians' Working Group
It is, but--
Liberal
Lawrence MacAulay Liberal Cardigan, PE
We have part of the European Union asking us not to use what you're telling us we should use. So how do we explain it to the world community? As doctors and people who are in involved in explaining how those things happen.... We're just commoners who serve the people. The fact is that we need to be able to explain to the world the necessity of what we're doing and how humane it is.
Now, there can be things that need to be done, but what you are suggesting is that we ask not to have them done in certain areas.
Department of Health Management and Centre for Aquatic Health Sciences, Atlantic Veterinary College, University of Prince Edward Island, Independent Veterinarians' Working Group
It's funny. I came to Canada two years ago, and before arriving here, I was watching TV and I saw this show showing Canadian sealers using hakapiks. I was shocked. I was thinking: I'm going to a civilized country; why do they still use a big stick of wood to kill animals? I really felt that it was gross and brutal.
But now, if you take the rationale apart and you really go through comparative studies, based on scientific facts.... We were just discussing this, and we figured out that if you look at all the anatomical features of the seal, combined with different scientific studies, you understand, finally, that the hakapik is probably the most efficient and humane way of killing a seal. But it's totally unesthetic. That's true. But once again, we discussed in our group using another way. For me, if I had to compare the hakapik to the rifle, I would much prefer the hakapik. That's my personal opinion. I went to the gulf in 2005 where they used the hakapik. I didn't see any animals suffering. I went to the front in 2006 where they used the rifle, and I saw dirty stuff.
So I'm here not to judge or to show something, I'm here to say that the system can be improved. We can have an evolution of the system. It's a commercial hunt and it should be done by professionals in a professional way.
Liberal
Lawrence MacAulay Liberal Cardigan, PE
But you're the expert. You tell us to use the hakapik, and the people in Europe tell us that if we use the hakapik, we're cruel. That's where we are.
Also, most of what you see in the media is the swimming motion after the hakapik is used. That's done for a reason, and it's done very successfully, but the fact is, it is a humane way of killing a seal. In some way we have groups that are working against what you say and against the seal hunt.
Where can we go? You're the professionals. You're the experts.
Coordinator, Sir James Dunn Animal Welfare Centre, Atlantic Veterinary College, University of Prince Edward Island and member of the Animal Welfare Committee of the Canadian Veterinary Medical Association, Independant Veterinarians' Working Group
Yes, but we're not experts in public relations.