Fisheries committee  It's very highly monitored relative to our other domestic fisheries. We monitor the nose and tail of the Grand Banks extremely carefully and very heavily. That probably has more monitoring than anything else. But we do monitor the seal fishery more than most of the other fisheries in the domestic waters.

Fisheries committee  It's clear that the message in Europe has generally been the message presented by the Humane Society of the United States, in the past IFAW, and other organizations. They have a point of view that is...you know, “skinning alive” and all those kinds of accusations. If people think critically about it, it's kind of silly.

Fisheries committee  Yes, and we make sure they understand it--

Fisheries committee  There was both. On the west coast, we have taken action to deal with the nuisance populations that were having a devastating impact on certain populations.

Fisheries committee  We don't have a target, as noted in the documents. Having said that, we want to keep it above the 70%. Somewhere above 4 million is what we're suggesting. That would be done not because of their role in the ecosystem. We just don't...or can't get a handle on what the population....

Fisheries committee  We estimate it's around 5.8 million, so there's a good buffer there. Having said that, as it's noted, we are harvesting aggressively. When the markets are there, there's an opportunity for the hunters to take more than what's called the “replacement yield”. The number of new pups that are produced minus the natural mortality will give you a replacement yield that you can take in a hunt and have no impact on the population.

Fisheries committee  I think it's important to recognize that the skin and the fat that are taken make up a pretty substantial portion of the animal, about 30% of the animal.

Fisheries committee  Just generally, as noted before, the role that seals play in the population of fish is very complex. For example, cod can lay 1 million or 5 million eggs, depending on the size of the female. Obviously there's a high mortality on those individuals at some stage--for instance, they're killed by filter feeders that are in turn eaten by seals.

Fisheries committee  The vast majority this year were shot. Do you have an estimate, Ken?

Fisheries committee  All of them are supposed to report, but we don't have a process for holding individuals accountable for the quality of the information we're getting. That's what we're going to change for 2007.

Fisheries committee  The quality of the information has been poor coming from the vessels. We have had a tendency in the past to open for a period of time, shut it down, and then wait to count the seals coming through the distribution chain. We've done that in the past, and we did that this year in the front.

Fisheries committee  There are bottlenecks in the distribution chain. There are not that many processors, etc., and they all go through those facilities. We have an opportunity to get a very good count from them of what was taken in total. That gives us a high degree of confidence that we know the number taken.

Fisheries committee  There are situations where there are more problems —

Fisheries committee  We recently sent a number of people to Europe to talk. We sent someone to Berlin and another person to The Hague. We started discussions with governments in Europe to convince them that the seal hunt was...

Fisheries committee  In 2006, we shared the quotas among fishermen. For example, there was a quota for fishermen from the Magdalen Islands, another for those from the Lower North Shore, one for Newfoundland, and so on. We established a process for getting data from those fishermen. Unfortunately, they didn't provide the right information on the number of seals they had killed.