It's less humane than the hakapik, actually. It's only a small percentage that use the hakapik, but when they're on ice, and ice that's thinner and ice that's slippery, the fishermen will use the hakapik sometimes to save their own lives. If they're slipping, they can use it to pull themselves back up on the ice. But the veterinary evidence is that, frankly, that's the most humane way. The hakapik makes sure they're dead and they're dead quickly.
I wanted to address the swimming reflex, because I don't think that was adequately explained. The veterinarians are very clear on this. Concerning these nasty images of animals being skinned alive, you've all heard of the chicken with its head cut off and it continues to run. For ninety seconds, I think, up to two minutes after an animal is killed, it has a swimming reflex—they're swimming animals—and it looks like a swimming motion. So you can have an animal that is clinically dead, and the veterinarians have testified to this, but if you take an image during those few moments—the fishermen are under pressure because of time; it's a very limited harvest period—that's where some of these nasty images have come from. There has been very, very careful scrutiny of these issues.
So I wanted to make sure we got that point on the agenda here.
As far as disease is concerned, the grey seals in Nova Scotia are twice the size. There's a huge grey seal herd there now that was managed maybe for decades at about a 10,000 population and is now up to about 300,000, as I understand it. Colleagues may want to correct me. We're hoping to see cod and other fish re-established in some of these coastal areas, but the seals eat a tremendous amount of fish. As I say, they only eat about 20% of the fish. There's a concern among fishermen now that the feces from these seals is being eaten by the cod, resulting in a real problem with the cod having a parasite that they've picked up through a cycle from the seals themselves. In managing any ecological system with biodiversity, we have to consider this.
When we talk about this animal management situation, if it were.... We're talking about wolves; they call them “sea wolves” in French. If it were wolves jumping over the farmer's fence and tearing the viscera out of sheep in the fields of Austria, Germany, England—or Scotland, for that matter, where you have a lot of sheep, I understand—would you not have some call for people to manage the wolf packs in your own communities?