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other animals for which successful conservation and management programs exist; 

 and the lack of understanding of how marine mammals in some situations can 

 have significant effects on other marine resources and fisheries. 



The Committee discussed the MMPA defintion of "take", which currently 

 includes to harass, hunt, capture, or kill a marine mammal or attempt to do 

 such. The suggestion to omit harassment from this definition was presented to 

 the Conmittee. However, the Committee concluded that unregulated harassment 

 of wildlife was inconsistent with sound management policy and proposed no 

 change in the current definition of "take" . 



The Committee proposed to amend the MMPA to provide appropriate 

 government entitites with the authority to lethally remove nuisance marine 

 mammals in limited situations where the conservation and protection of other 

 significant resources are at risk . Currently the MMPA provides resource 

 agenices with the authority to use only non-lethal measures in these cases. 

 The Committee recognized that in certain situations the lethal removal of 

 known destructive individual animals is the option that can best benefit the 

 marmial population as well as other marine resources. 



The concept of Optimum Sustainable Populations (OSP) was discussed and no 

 change in the current definition of OSP was proposed . However, by providing 

 for the flexibility to manage any species (see proposed amendment below), OSP 

 would become the goal of management programs rather than the restriction that 

 prevents implementation of sound management policies. 



The Committee recognized that in many cases the sound conservation and 

 management of all living marine resources can only be accomplished by 

 providing the authority to take from marine mammal stocks as part of 

 comprehensive management programs. With the exception of takes for scientific 

 research, the MMPA currently allows taking only from marine mammal populations 



