There should be some small demand for use in first nations crafts and for food in some of the few first nations specialty restaurants, but the amount that would be utilized for those uses, is in my opinion very limited.
Given the numbers that need to be removed to protect salmon and the fact that we have a massively over populated seal problem and now also, in addition, have a massively overpopulated sea lion problem, the only commercial uses that would be able to make use of the kind of tonnage that would be needed to make even a small dent in these populations would be processing into animal feed and into crop fertilizer/composting.
Talked to an old timer who lives on the water in Sooke and has spent a great deal of time on the water and does volunteer work at the local hatchery. His view was that if we don’t reduce the pinniped populations greatly in the next 2 years, the Chinook and Coho salmon will be all but gone. He mentioned situations where a small groups of Transient Orca have actually been intimidated and chased off by very large groups of seal lions working together like a whole lot of wolves chasing of a small group of cougars. I guess if you have the numbers the weaker predators can work together to overcome the bigger stronger predators.
The bottleneck going into Sooke harbour is now just a salmon killing ground for the pinnipeds.
Only in the past few years have I seen extremely large groups of sea lions deep in the Sooke Basin in the late summer/early fall and also in the Inlet at that time.
