No, it wouldn't, from our perspective.
From my observations, and also studies by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, if you look at the commercial seal hunt, these guys are shooting at seals from moving boats, they're shooting moving animals on moving ice floes. It's very hard to kill a seal with one bullet in those conditions, often in extreme weather conditions, big ocean swells.
I was just at a North Atlantic Marine Mammal Commission meeting in Denmark. They noted struck and loss is very influenced by environmental factors. We have a hunt that occurs far offshore, on the ocean, on these ice floes. So when sealers are shooting at animals, they often don't kill them with just one bullet. What I observe up in the Front, where the Canadian government claims that 90% of the seals are killed, is that sealers will immobilize seals with a bullet, pull the boat up alongside, climb over the side, hop onto a very small ice pan and finish the animal off with a club, hook the animal, drag the animal onto the boat. Sometimes they don't bother clubbing before they hook the animal and drag them onto the boat.
It's a very inaccurate way of killing animals. The Canadian government admits that 5% of the young seals that are shot at on or near ice floes are struck and lost, which means they're wounded and they're allowed to escape. They're recovered and they die slowly. If you do the math, that 5%, plus the 50% of adult seals that the Canadian government estimates are struck and lost, translates to an average of 26,000 seals per year. That's a tremendous number of animals dying slow and painful deaths. So, no, we don't believe that shooting is a good way to kill these animals.
As a final point on that, processing companies take off money for every bullet hole they find in the skin, so sealers have an incentive not to shoot seals more than once. So if you immobilize a seal with a bullet, you don't want to shoot that seal again, because the company is going to take off money for that extra bullet hole. That's why you will wait and go and club the animal to finish it off. That is the reality of the commercial seal hunt. It's because of the physical environment in which this hunt operates that shooting and clubbing are both inherently inhumane.