Whaling as an irrational human activity
Dr. George Voskopoulos
June 22, 2008
Japan [1], Iceland and Norway are still practicing whaling for "scientific" reasons. "Scientific" whaling still remains one of those human activities that tar the image of our societies. My IFAW friends in the US have long realised that. As they point out,
whales are not saved. Although commercial whaling has been banned for more than two decades, Japan, Iceland and Norway continue to fire harpoons into these gentle creatures. More than 30,000 whales have been killed since the 1986 ban on whaling. Harpoons using the same explosive grenade heads employed fifty years ago are still used today.
Often, the first blast isn't enough to kill the poor whale. Whaling ships have been filmed hoisting live whales up the side of their huge industrial ships by the tail, leav-ing the whale's blow hole underwater. The helpless whale can only thrash against the side of the ship, desperate for air, until it slowly drowns.
Perhaps even more shocking, this unsanctioned killing is happening in the protected waters around Antarctica in the Southern Ocean Marine Sanctuary, blatantly defying international law.
Killing whales under the guise of conducting scientific research, when the actual purpose of killing the whales is to sell their meat in the pursuit of profit, is deceitful and unlawful under international law.
In the past 15 years, Japan has increased its catch five-fold to more than 1,200 whales each year and is now targeting 50 humpbacks each year for the next two years. This painful slaughter of whales does not benefit science, whales or people".
Whaling is a commercial activity taking place under the pretext of conducting scien-tific research. It has been going on for too long because human beings suffer from the ostrich syndrome, that is our inability to face the problem and bear the political, eco-nomic and social cost of putting an end to the slaughter of these great mammals.
The International Whaling Commission appears unable to impose standards for genu-ine scientific whaling practices. The ontological question is whether this constitutes a simple institutional inability to impose an uncompromised policy or a cover-up effort to allow whaling.
In the course of time the IWC has been rather an obstacle to the effort to impose an international regime on whaling. In 1971 at the Conference on Human Environment in Stockholm a proposal for a ten-year moratorium on all commercial whaling was almost unanimously supported but it was not adopted by the IWC. It was the time the US ended commercial whaling.
Again in 1989 the IWC set high quotas to boost the whaling industry despite drastic depletion of stocks. These are indicative only of the inability or unwillingness of the IWC to protect endangered species and provide a universal regime on whaling.
National governments are also responsible since they did not provide alternatives to those involved in this commercial activity. Their livelihood should be secured by in-troducing alternative commercial activities. The adopted policies and non-policies failed to protect whales and manage dramatically depleted stocks.
IFAW and Greenpeace [2] have made substantial efforts to internationalize the issue and expose the policies of those few countries that continue whaling. They should get credit and support for their policies on sustainable commercial activities. At the same time it is obvious that the international community along with national governments need to find a means to end whaling and redirect whalers to activities that do not threaten the balance of ecosystems. If supply and demand set the rules of the game then our role as a parameter of demand should be externalised in any possible way.
1] In 1994 the IWC decided to create a vast Southern Ocean whale sanctuary. Japan voted against it, while Norway abstained
2] In 1993 Greenpeace boycotted all Norwegian products due to Norway´s decision to ignore IWC´s ban on whaling.
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