Whale hunt update: IWC to consider easing ban to reduce Japan's annual kill

News item: The International Whaling Commission is considering easing its ban on commercial whaling to allow Japan to hunt whales off its coast — if Japan promises to kill fewer whales in the Antarctic.

Reaction: What the IWC ought to do is keep the ban in place and tighten the loophole that allows Japan to hunt whales in the Antarctic in the name of science, then turn and sell the whale meat commercially to a populace that is increasingly turned off by the product.

There are only three nations remaining with whaling industries: Norway, Iceland and Japan, whose industry is the largest, claiming up to 1,000 whales annually. Japan has essentially ignored a 1986 ban intended to protect intelligent mammals that for generations endured wide-scale slaughter, with many species hunted to the brink of extinction.

The U.S., thankfully, believes the ban should remain in place. Conservation groups do too. Said Capt. Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, of a proposed lifting of the ban: "It's sort of like saying to bank robbers that you can't rob a bank in the city, but we'll let you do it in the country."

The issue will be raised during the IWC's meeting in June.

— Pete Thomas

Photo: U.S. whaling ship operates off Malibu area in the 1930s. As many as 250 gray whales were harpooned off Point Dume annually until a lack of whales and dying industry halted the slaughter. Pacific gray whales, once on the brink of extinction, now number about 20,000. Credit: Emerson Gaze

Comments

[Nancy Hicks]

How does this deal help the whales?

[Pelelope Caribe]

Why should people bow to the wishes of Japan and a few others when the vast majority of countries are against killing whales. Whaling should be banned for good. Polluted seas, global warming, getting beached year after year, the list goes on, these intelligent sentient beings have enough to deal with without getting their insides blown inside out by a deadly harpoon and agnonise for hours just because an insignificant minority deem themselves with the right to eat their flesh.

[Penelope]

Considering that most of the world would rather see whales than eat them I see no reason to bow down to 3 or 4 countries who insist on slaughtering these intelligent sentient sea mammals. Sea pollution, global warming, constant beaching are only a few of the hazards whales have to face every day of their lives. Having their insides blown inside out and suffering a long agonizing death is not what whales deserve. Whale watching is one of the wonderful experiences anybody could hope to experience so lets not bend to the will of a tiny majority that feel the rather doubtful need to eat the flesh of these wonderful ceatures.

[Caroline Pott]

"The U.S., thankfully, believes the ban should remain in place. Conservation groups do too."

Its a little more complicated than this article portrays. The US Commissioner has brokered this deal, and while he maintains that allowing coastal hunts in the North Pacific is not a lifting of the moratorium, it clearly is.

While all the details of the plan are not yet known, as it has been portrayed, the plan will implicitly sanction what Japan has already been doing to date, and will not achieve any lasting improvements in Japan's accountability to the international community or limit their catches to numbers based on scientific sustainability estimates.

See the Washington Post article which broke the story: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/27/AR2009012700474.html

[Malcolm Green]

Caroline,

Technically speaking, Hogarth is probably right. I haven't seen the proposal (which I don't think will be agreed anyway so this is all academic), but I imagine what he is refering to is with respect to the part of the IWC rule book (they call it the "Schedule") that includes text which is effectively the temporary pause of commercial whaling ("moratorium"). The proposal probably doesn't remove that particular text, but it likely adds extra text to the effect that a new exemption is created for proposed Japanese whaling under this suggested trade-off.

In reality, of course, the moratorium would be overturned, as Japan is the only of the 3 major commercial whaling nations that still officially abides by it (scientific permit whaling is enshrined in the IWC's convention, and simple Schedule changes can not take that right away).

As the anti-whaling nations generally appear to care more about whether the moratorium remains in place than the number of whales killed, I can't see them excepting this proposal, and I also can't see Japan agreeing to scale back it's Antarctic programme to the extent that the anti-whaling nations would see it as worth their while to agree. The basic problem with this idea is Japan wants a tiny bit of commercial whaling for a few whaling families, where as the anti-whalers want to have Japan stop at least the entire Antarctic research programme. This is just not an even trade so it ain't going to happen.

[Wiesiek Rzadek]

Mr Green wrote: "The basic problem with this idea is Japan wants a tiny bit of commercial whaling for a few whaling families, where as the anti-whalers want to have Japan stop at least the entire Antarctic research programme." I honestly cannot understand this claim. It's clearly not the case of Lamalera, Indonesia, where actually few families hunt whales using handmade boats and ropes (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-465987/The-stone-age-whale-hunters-kill-bare-hands.html). Japan wants to preserve a whale hunting industry, a multimillion (billions probably considering the equipment) enterprise employing a large number of people. If the members of "few whaling families" are employed there, they constitute probably about few percent of the whole business. There is absolutely nothing traditional about Japanese whaling methods. Apart from financial reasons the main motivations of the Japanese government is probably to preserve jobs. Does that outweighs killing whales? Or to put it differently, does Japanese government really cannot find any other jobs for these people?