With the race mentality, when we're into a competitive fishery, as the seal harvest is, it will exist no matter what we do. It would be almost impossible to totally remove it. The veterinarians we met in Halifax last year talked about the use of the hakapik. One thing was to palpate the skull to ensure that the animal was rendered what they termed irrevocably unconscious.
If you go into an abattoir where they slaughter cows, these animals are not dead when they are rendered irrevocably unconscious with the use of a bolt. By palpating the skull, you would then ensure that the brain is destroyed. To do this and then bleed out the animal would benefit our side of the industry as far as quality is concerned. An important factor in killing an animal is the bleeding. Seals that are not bled properly develop what we call ice burn; some of the older sealers refer to it as blood burn.
Once the animal is dead and the heart has stopped beating, the blood collects in the lower parts, and this reacts negatively with the pelt. For instance, a seal that is ice burned has a pelt like tissue paper. This happens within minutes on certain days, depending on the sun and things like that. Bleeding out the animal certainly will help to stop this problem from developing. It will also slow down the harvest. Sealers would not be able to just go around and kill, kill, kill. They would have to bleed out the animals as they go. So that may slow it down somewhat.
With regard to boat quotas, as I said in my presentation, there are many sealers and boats. There are 14,000 licences and hundreds of vessels out there every spring. If you start distributing it, it may become uneconomical. If the skipper has to gear up for 150 pelts, it's hardly worth his while. Insurance is so expensive for sealers, it's my understanding, that to go out in these conditions and to only be able to take 100 animals, or even fewer, may not be economically viable for them.
When you start subdividing the quota, you run the risk of not taking all the quota. A vessel could be out there, but can only take 100 or 200 animals, then it has to leave. Another vessel may be stuck in ice and may not be able to get to the animals. The animals are only easy to get for a short period of time. Once they take to the water, when they become full-fledged beaters, then it becomes very difficult to take them. It becomes very expensive to move around in the ice and pick up these animals.
Breaking it down into ever smaller components makes it more and more possible that if we have a TAC of 325,000 animals then maybe only 250,000 or fewer will be taken. If you look back through the statistics, I'm not sure, but in the last 20 years there've probably only been two or three years in those 20-odd years that the entire TAC has been taken, for various reasons. Sometimes it's ice conditions or sometimes it could be that it was shut down too early. I think subdividing it is certainly very problematic.