In 1977 the Department of Agriculture and Fisheries for Scotland announced a six-year plan to reduce the Scottish grey seal population to the mid-1960s level, a reduction in numbers of up to a third; 900 breeding females and their pups and 4000 moulted pups in Orkney and North Rona were to be killed in the first year, 1978. But protests from the public and from conservation and animal welfare groups were such that the kill was called off.