I'd like to come to back to the point about the European Food Safety Authority. When the EU was considering the ban on seal products, they evaluated seal hunting practices in all the range states where seal hunting was conducted for commercial purposes. Canada was actually identified as having quite a high level of animal welfare standards compared to other hunts. We are on the right track and we continue to be on the right track.
The validation is strictly what is required by consumers to understand that it needs to be an ISO certification. It has to be third party. EFSA, the European Food Safety Authority, themselves identified that there was bias in the science that existed. There is no way that videos secured by animal rights groups that are strictly there to end the hunt can be considered unbiased. Even when submitted for regulatory purposes within Canada, there are problems with the continuity, the starting and stopping.
As I mentioned earlier, it's very difficult for veterinarians, let alone lay people, to witness the harvesting or dispatching of a marine mammal or any other animal when they have no attachment to it, and then decide whether or not it's good or bad.
We've worked with a lot of veterinarians and they always recognize that it takes thorough investigation to understand on the videotape whether or not an animal is experiencing pain, distress, or suffering. Just because there's an involuntary swimming reflex does not mean the seal is alive, but to the lay person witnessing this, it's very difficult to understand.
Most importantly, the sealing community, the people who do the hunting, are very much in favour of improving the animal welfare standard where they can, recognizing that Canada currently has perhaps the highest animal welfare standard of any wildlife hunt in the world. Validation of that is required by someone else other than the Canadian government saying, “Well, we're great. Trust us; we know what we're doing” or for a processor to say, “Trust me; it's okay what we're doing”.
We need that third party validation and we need to stop video that's taken just to undermine all the efforts that we've made collectively to improve the animal welfare standard and the viability of the Canadian seal hunt.