Fisheries committee  All the groups plan the way to do it together. The Magdalen Islands hunters conduct a good hunt everywhere. Most of them use hooks or pick axes. According to the experts, there's no problem in using those tools.

Fisheries committee  Yes, we have a committee that meets with them every two weeks or every month.

Fisheries committee  This is a report presented by the Independent Veterinarians Working Group, which is made up of experts. At the committee's last meeting in Newfoundland, in November, the group made a presentation on the way to improve hunting practices. That presentation was well received by seal

Fisheries committee  We have created a permit system now for all of Atlantic Canada. If there is a nuisance seal established, you can hunt it. What you do is you go and apply for a licence and establish that it is there. We found, I think, in looking at this situation, that it's not so much harp sea

Fisheries committee  Just to add to that, we did have more aggressive options that we presented at the forum. There were lots of fishing groups there as well as seal harvesters, and it was amazing that the majority didn't want us to do that, to pursue aggressively.

Fisheries committee  No, there were fishing industry people--FFAW, all kinds of people--there as well. You have to remember that there are different culprits the fishing industry may see; in some areas, it's grey seals. We do know from previous surveys that Atlantic cod made up 3% of harp seals' di

Fisheries committee  They have a choice everywhere, but the regulations stipulate what a club has to be, its minimum dimensions and size, and what a hakapik has to be, and also what firearms they have to use. A lot of our charges do stem from improper firearms--for example, using birdshot in a shotgu

Fisheries committee  The weakness in marketing the whole animal is the meat. We did a meat subsidy that began in about 1995 and finished off in 1999. We found that they were taking mainly big adult seals. The pelt was actually getting wasted because it has less value. We were propping up markets that

Fisheries committee  Just longliners.

Fisheries committee  We don't really have estimates. We know that 70% of the seals are taken on the front, and almost all of those are shot. The clubbing generally occurs in the southern Gulf of St. Lawrence, around the Magdalen Islands, and in the Prince Edward Island area. It's just a rough guess

Fisheries committee  We've had very few observers. One year we had eight, for example. We're trying to increase that. The trouble is that it's impractical when you have two or three people on a small boat. Longliners have crews of six to twelve people, and every spot they give up is a hunter. So we'

Fisheries committee  That's what we're trying to correct now, particularly with the small boats. We're trying to bring in perhaps a vessel registration system--that's what we're looking at with the industry now--so that we can make one person responsible for reporting. Right now we have a loophole wh

Fisheries committee  People who oppose the hunt like to use figures from the past in the high Arctic and the Greenland hunt, in open seas, colder water, where animals will sink quickly and animals are shot in the water. Most of our animals are killed on the ice, or the vast majority of them are. For

Fisheries committee  We don't have the right figures for all species. There's a new way of calculating the number of grey seals, and the people responsible for that are preparing a new way to calculate the hooded seal population. The seal population of Greenland is estimated every five years, but tha

Fisheries committee  Not really.