I just want to clarify that I agree that humans are part of nature and the ecosystem. I'm not here to in any way speak out against a sustainably managed seal harvest. However, my distinction between a cull and a harvest, I think, is different from some of the committee members'. I can understand why the end use of the seal is important for a harvester or a societal value discussion, but for the ecosystem, what happens to the seal after it's been killed doesn't matter.
For me, from an ecosystem perspective, a more meaningful distinction is how we set our management objectives for the harvest. Generally, in conventional fisheries management, our objective is to ensure a healthy population and healthy ecosystem function, but if you want to kill seals to benefit fish stocks, it's the opposite of that. You're trying to depress the population and actively alter how the ecosystem functions.
What's linked to that is how you set your harvest rate. A harvest rate based on sustainable and healthy populations is very different from saying that we want to benefit a certain fish stock, because the literature is very clear that to have any chance at all of the pinniped cull benefiting fish populations, you will have to have a reduction of at least 50%. That would completely fall outside of the bounds of a sustainably managed harvest.
For me, that is a more meaningful distinction, from an ecosystem perspective, between a cull and a harvest.