I'm going to turn this over to Dr. Lavigne in one second, but I want to answer that.
I think it would be money well spent and something we would certainly be interested in doing. However, a seal population study takes several years to complete. It's a very costly and involved undertaking, and you need to have the cooperation of the Canadian government, I believe, to do it adequately.
You mentioned being unable to go out to count these seals, but being told that the seal population is dramatically increasing. What the Canadian government forgets to mention when it uses that statistic is that the population had been dramatically reduced by the 1970s, when it was at a level of approximately two million. Some senior Canadian government scientists estimated that up to two-thirds of that population had been removed by the 1970s.
At the time, they were worried that without an absence of commercial hunting for at least a decade we could lose the harp seal population. Yes, the population has grown; I would definitely say it has grown. But it's been in a recovery.
Do I think it's at 5.8 million? No, I don't, but I'm not a biologist, and that's why I'll turn it over to Dr. Lavigne, who is a biologist.