Thank you for that question.
My objective today, and something I'd like to leave the committee with, is I'm hoping DFO will continue to give the allocation to the Grey Seal Research and Development Society. I would like to see a scientific forum with industry on ecosystem and commercial fisheries impacts. I don't think they are well understood. We need to bring in scientists from Norway, Iceland, and other places where they're dealing with this issue. We need to ask the right impact questions. In my view, they're not being asked, especially the seal worm issue. I think that's a huge one. The scientists in Iceland pointed me in that direction regarding the waste material, the ketones, excreted by the worms. If the committee members could just see some of the fish we take off the Scotian Shelf now and how lousy it is with worms.... In that moratorium area, where we do some scientific research on the fish off the eastern shore of Nova Scotia, processors will open fish and find it's only fit for the trash can. That cannot be healthy fish. No questions are being asked about that.
We need to establish a target population level for that herd based upon its ecosystem impact. We need to review the restricted areas, and they are numerous. We need to look at harvest methods. For example, one of the difficulties we have concerns the great difference between harvesting harp seals. Newfoundland sealers can go out on the ice, there are no restricted areas for them, whereas we have to harvest grey seals on islands and on coastlines. For meat, if we shoot an adult--and that's the way we kill them--if there are 12 of them there, we get one, the rest hit the water, and they're gone. Now that's not an economical way to harvest. We'd like to be able to use a net to catch some of them, so we can harvest an economical group. We've asked DFO for permission, and it hasn't been granted. Right now, we can't fill the order to China, and we want to target adults, because the harvest method is very difficult.
I'll just point out that elephants in South African parks are managed. They're culled when the numbers get too high because of the destruction of the vegetation. Wild animals in Australia are managed the same way. When I was down in Washington, D.C., in December, for a conference, in The Washington Post and The New York Times I was reading about a cull: We need more deer hunters around suburban areas in Maryland, Virginia, and New Jersey, because the deer herds see the suburban yards and gardens as one big salad bowl, and destroy the landscape, the flowers. For some reason, seals have become sacred and we'll allow this devastation to happen to an industry and to our coastline, and do nothing about it.