As one of the tools in a very specific toolkit. Seals and cormorants and mergansers and salmon have coexisted forever, and there is survival of the fittest and a balanced ecosystem and so on.
There have been a number of research efforts made in trying to determine the actual impact that a huge seal population may have on wild salmon. In specific river estuaries, where there's a high concentration of seals on a Pacific salmon run, perhaps a seal cull is the way to go, but a widespread willy-nilly cull may not have any positive effect.
Coming back to the numbers—I guess I didn't make the point well enough, but I certainly tried in my presentation—the negative impacts of aquaculture on wild salmon, again well documented, and talks of disease and ISA and sea lice and pollution, and on and on.... The most critical impact is the genetic impact. While the vast majority of aquaculture escapees likely die shortly after they escape, the sheer number of the escapes.... Less than a year ago, this time last year, there were three big escape events in the Bay of Fundy. The reported escapes from the industry, by the provincial government, were in excess of 200,000 fish. So even if you only have 0.1% of those 200,000 fish, you still have 2,000 escapees, and we see them running up our rivers, like the Magaguadavic, where the aquaculture escapees each year for the last decade have actually outnumbered the wild run. It only takes a couple of meetings and a couple of generations before you begin to lose your wild salmon, your salmon runs.
I absolutely agree that we need clear science and we need definitive science. That's why the Atlantic Salmon Federation is again trying to be part of the solution, and we've been doing this work on the Magaguadavic for the last number of years. I don't want to pretend to know all the answers, but we can share with you what we do know and hopefully learn from past experience, and in many cases not a great experience.