Okay. I'm going to give a quick answer to that on behalf of the committee, if I may, and then we'll give some of our other members an opportunity to speak.
Those are all good and legitimate questions, but you should be aware that in the low cycle of the harvest in the early 1970s, there were about 1.9 million seals in the northeast Atlantic. Today, by conservative estimates, we expect there are about 5.9 million seals. Many people will tell you there are more seals than that.
I will give you a quick example of my own. I used to work in the offshore oil field as a driller in the offshore in Sable Island, which is an island about 225 miles off the coast of Nova Scotia. When we first went out there in 1980--it also has horses on it--we used to always count the horses as we flew over in a helicopter, and you could literally count the seals on the northeast spit and the southwest spit. Eight years later, it was crowded for two miles on either spit, because that was the down point of the harvest. Those are primarily harps and greys. There are some hooded. There was a huge explosion in the population. That explosion was mainly because we were rebuilding our markets for seal products around the world, and it was simply at a low point in the harvest. But it was an exponential increase in the amount of seals.
On the east coast in Nova Scotia, if we think about grey seals for a moment, they've also adapted to fishing practices, and when you talk about the amount of fish a seal eats, you've got to multiply that by five, because they eat only 20%. The seal only eats the stomach and the soft internal organs of the fish. It'll rip the skin off the fish, because the skin's full of oil and it's very fatty. So whatever the estimate is on the amount of fish that is eaten, multiply that by five.
The other issue you spoke about is percentage of GDP. That's a convenient number found by a bunch of NGOs who are against the seal hunt. Quite frankly, in any of your ridings, if you took a group of individuals involved in any resource sector and said that an addition of $15,000 or $20,000 to their income in a very low employment area wasn't important, you would be mistaken.
Of course, in the overall economy of the country and in the economy of the province, for instance, in Newfoundland and Labrador, it is a small portion. For those individuals, it may be 50% of their income, it may be 30% of their income, but it is a significant portion of their income.
I see some of our observers smiling at that statement, but they've obviously never tried to live on $15,000 or $20,000 a year or less. But if you live in the outports of Newfoundland or in a coastal community in Nova Scotia, dependent upon employment insurance for most of the year, your income from sealing is extremely important.
Forty per cent of the quota exceeded: I would be shocked at that statement. I don't know where it comes from. We have allowed for an increase in the hunt over the last several years. That increase has been governed on the side of conservation. As I've pointed out, we went from a herd of 1.8 million or 1.9 million animals in the early 1970s to a herd of 5.9 million or 6 million today. So obviously the overall health and sustainability of the herd has never been threatened.
Your final question was on the beaters. The beaters are young animals without question, but they're fully weaned and have been abandoned by their mothers. So they're on the ice independent of any parent to depend on or to be fed by. They simply lie on the ice and live off their fat reserves until they're able to enter the water. They are forced by starvation to enter the water and learn to fish on their own, and it's instinctive. They're not taught to fish. They're simply abandoned by their mothers.
That's a quick rundown. My membership will have me hanged on the yardarm if I speak too much, so I'm going to turn it over to Mr. Bill Matthews, our vice-chair and first speaker.