Thank you, Mr. Chair.
In listening and reading all of the testimony, certain things start to triangulate.
There was a particularly interesting piece out of Washington state that I'd like some reaction to. In Puget Sound, they did a little bit of work on, basically, their allowance to enact what they call “specific lethal management strategies”. Under the MMPA, states can request this.
They played off something we heard in earlier testimony here. Sometimes it's man-made infrastructure like fish ladders, log booms or other things that provide a nice spot for the seals to hang out so that they can feed on the fish that are concentrated in that area. Somebody just recently said that pinnipeds are very clever; they're very smart.
This sentence from the Washington state report maybe leads us somewhere. It says:
The removal of individual California sea lions with specific knowledge of sites at Willamette Falls also reported successful reduction in the use of the sites by sea lions and in the recruitment of new individuals. These outcomes suggest it may be feasible to disrupt socially transmitted predation behaviours among pinnipeds by removing individual specialists.
That sort of says something about, again, how clever these animals are. It also perhaps suggests that we don't need to go down the route that the representative from the David Suzuki Foundation was concerned about, that we would go out and willy-nilly cull seals with a massive reduction. It's to do something that we've heard referenced before, and that is to go after the problem animals.
I'm wondering, Mr. Zeman, if you could comment on that and the potential for something that would allow for a reasonably sized harvest, given current market conditions. It's a useful outcome for what we harvest, and it would avoid doing the sort of things that would clearly get activists on the case, as Ms. Shears has experienced.