Opinion: Counting -- and hunting -- whales

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Oh, countries listen to the International Whaling Commission all right -- as long as they want to. Most nations observe the international ban on whale hunting because they agree with it. As for the rest -- well, of the big three that continue to kill whales, Iceland and Norway simply ignore the ban. And for years, Japan has operated under an exemption allowing it to take whales for scientific research. But with each whale worth tens of thousands of dollars in meat and other products, you can bet a lot more than research is going on, like whale dinners served in upscale restaurants. And does it really take close to 1,000 whales to conduct this research, which is the quota that Japan sets for itself?

The whales that the Japanese hunt, mostly minke, are considered to be at ‘lower risk’ of extinction. Now Greenland wants to hunt 50 endangered humpback whales over the next few years, saying this would be subsistence hunting for its indigenous people. There’s certainly precedence for this: The Inuit have been allowed to take several dozen bowhead whales for years. This kind of subsistence hunting is an ancient part of their tradition. But there’s more to it. Under the Inuits’ tightly managed hunt, the bowhead comeback in the eastern Arctic has been a conservation success story. Adding an endangered species like the humpback whale to the list, though, raises a new set of complications -- which the International Whaling Commission put off dealing with at its recent meeting.

Another issue that has to be addressed is which individual whales are selected out for hunting by the Japanese whalers. A study presented at the IWC meeting found that nearly a third of the whales killed were pregnant. Assuming those whale calves would otherwise have been born and survived, this means a lot more whales are being killed than the number being counted as part of Japan’s research.

* Photo of humpback whale by Greenpeace