Leave the Rest Behind
A survey of Irish commercial salmon fisheries carried out by Crummey in 1992 showed that an entire 92 percent of the salmon had been damaged by seals. The grey seal stock off the coast of Scotland and Ireland has been on the increase and the current official minimum estimate of stock size is somewhere around 80,000. Shortly after the turn of the century, the stock was down to below 1,000, and was therefore protected by law in 1914. “Grey seals are certainly not now an endangered species but nevertheless, remain a protected species,” said Crummey.
Food consumption values for the present grey seal stock work out at 250,000 tonnes of fish per annum. “This is 5.5 times the Irish white fish quota for all the CITES areas around our coast ... based on the closely matching results of stomach content analyses studies in numerous countries over many years, 90 percent of the diet of grey seals are known to be of commercially important species,” said Crummey.
“It is alleged that there is scientific evidence that culling seals does not reduce levels of physical interaction (between seals and fisheries). There are insufficient data to be able to say one way or the other, so this statement is false,” ascertained Crummey.
At the conference on “Responsible Wildlife Resource Management” arranged by the European Bureau for Conservation and Development, Ciaran Crummey presented video material showing how grey seals were systematically emptying the fishing nets. The seals often take only a few bites out of the larger fish and leave the rest behind.