Fisheries committee  No. It all depends on how everything's done, of course. If we're talking about a well-managed hunt, then as far as seal hunting goes, it should be fine.

Fisheries committee  There are things like dune damage that would have to be considered. Running all over with ATVs, or something like that, would have to be considered. Presumably if this is an option, there would be a hunt management plan. That's what's usually prepared. This would be outlined, it would be examined, and then problems would be identified and the hunters, or whoever, would be expected to mitigate.

Fisheries committee  It is possible to apply for a nuisance seal licence, but I think this region has to come up with their criteria. The way it has been set up nationally, you have to show clearly that it is a nuisance. It is not meant to be a solution for a problem of too many seals; it's supposed to be a solution for a particular pain in the butt that's causing economic damage.

Fisheries committee  There was a policy in this region before where it was fairly open, but new policies have come through nationally and they've been trying to tighten up on that. One factor is that we just have no idea how many seals are actually taken under this licensing scheme. So there are still some things that need to be worked out.

Fisheries committee  It's 1.5 tonnes consumed, actually eaten. So if there's fish that's left over but not eaten, that's not taken into account.

Fisheries committee  You guys make it tough, because you put a five-minute limitation on everything. You just threw out a motherhood statement of a question. From what we've seen so far in the ocean, it's very hard to tease out the big controlling factor. There are obviously some bottom-up effects and some top-down effects.

Fisheries committee  What we're seeing is a natural filling in of what was once the grey seal range. What we've seen in the last 50 years was that the population was largely 70% in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and 30% on the Scotian Shelf. Because the seals were breeding on the ice, this is an area that was not accessible to any hunting.

Fisheries committee  Without doing the math, the easy answer is that you take all the pups that are born--that's the simplest thing--but you're not going to see any change in population size for about four to five years. It takes four to five years before they become mature, and it's at that stage that you start to see the impact of your culling program, if that's what you want to do.

Fisheries committee  Are you talking pups?

Fisheries committee  I might add that a lot of this is based on the idea.... This started out looking at the harp seal hunt, which is where we have a profitable fishery. We want to preserve that resource. That forms the basis for the plans, trying to make them fit across wherever we go. Some of our work is suggesting that the carrying capacity for grey seals could be in the order of 400,000 seals.

Fisheries committee  We downsized, or whatever you want to call it, our parasite program in 1998. We moved away from that. We have not been doing a lot of research. There's still one researcher looking at cod worm, I think, and he's based out of Moncton now. We do not do a lot of science on this aspect right now.

Fisheries committee  We can go back and re-examine. In the work that was done in the early 1990s, we looked at impacts and ways it could be controlled. One of them was the delivery of ivermectin, which is a worm control agent that was delivered to seals. The technique worked fairly well as far as cleaning up worms out of the seals goes, but the problem was the delivery mechanism--trying to make sure you gave it to a seal in a safe manner for the person who was doing it and also in a safe manner for the seal.

Fisheries committee  That's one way of doing it, although probably a more effective way is injecting them on Sable Island or on the ice during the pupping season. You can approach the animals then and you'd just hit them up, so to speak. We have done a fair amount of this work. Maybe a lot of this stuff needs to be re-examined, because it's apparent from industry that it's more of a problem now.

Fisheries committee  That's the other approach.

Fisheries committee  I guess several things need to be examined here. First, seals are responsible for what percentage of natural mortality in cod? In the analyses we've done, it's fishing that has driven down the cod population. Is what limited fishing that now exists the main factor limiting the recovery, or is it what is being consumed by the grey seals?