The implications of Shane Jones and his party scrapping the essential Fishing Related Morality Limit (FRML) of 52 New Zealand sea lions/pakake per year include:
– Absolving Fisheries of any responsibility towards protecting pakake.
– Empowering people who do not care for pakake to behave with reckless abandon and malice.
– Historical population modelling of pakake have shown that pre-human colonisation there were 70,000+ pakake across New Zealand/Aotearoa.
Now, there are only approximately 12,000 individuals; and they are classified as ‘Endangered’ on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.
– The combination of Sealing; Māori subsistence hunting; Fisheries – directly (bycatch) and indirectly (starvation); and human interference – vehicle collisions, shootings and stabbings, have resulted in an estimated 60,000 pakake being killed since humans colonised Aotearoa.
– To date, there are no records of pakake killing humans.
Photo: National Library of New Zealand.