Whaling
From stone-age carvings in South Korea to Japan’s oldest book, the seventh-century Kojki, the story of whale hunting stretches back far into human history. But its most recent chapters chronicle a familiar tale of human greed and the rampant over-exploitation of a resource. Such was the demand for whale oil – prized as a fuel for lamps and lubricant for trains – that one species after another was hunted to the brink of extinction. But by the mid-20th century, there was a dawning realisation that this rape of the seas couldn’t continue indefinitely.The great whaling nations, including Britain and the USA, gradually pulled out of the hunt. By the 1970s, the burgeoning environmental movement had seized upon the plight of the whales as a flagship issue – Save the Whale became an international campaign and once-proud whaling nations were transformed into staunch defenders of their former quarry. By 1982, the pressure on whaling to change its ways was so great that the International Whaling Commission (IWC) announced a moratorium that was finally implemented in 1986.It was seen as a landmark victory for the environmental movement – it seemed that ‘the whale’ had finally been saved. Yet some whaling nations refused to be beaten – since 1986, Japan, Norway and Iceland have killed more than 26,000 whales between them. As far as these nations are concerned, the moratorium was only ever intended to be temporary. The IWC was, after all, originally a ‘whalers club’, its remit “to provide for the proper conservation of whale stocks and thus make possible the orderly development of the whaling industry”.
While the whaling nations have so far failed to end the moratorium – anti-whalers have held the balance of power at the IWC for the past few decades – the whaling nations have found ways to keep the industry alive. Norway and Iceland have registered official objections, enabling them to argue that their commercial hunts are perfectly legal. Along with Japan, they also hunt whales in the name of science, which is allowed under article eight of the IWC convention. Each year, the pro- and anti-whaling nations slug it out at the IWC meeting and, in recent years, Japan has upped the ante, embarking on a vigorous campaign to recruit new countries to the commission that are sympathetic to its cause. It has been widely accused of buying votes with fisheries aid, and although they deny this, their support is such that last year, Japan won its first vote since the moratorium, passing a motion that the IWC should consider the resumption of commercial whaling and sending shockwaves through the anti-whaling community. The fear now is that at this year’s IWC meeting, Japan will have a simple majority on a number of votes. And while this wouldn’t be enough to overturn the moratorium (three quarters of the vote is needed) it could tip the scales in the whalers’ favour, with key votes on aboriginal whaling rights likely to give the whalers additional bargaining powers.
Imminent crisis
Campaigners warn that unless anti-whaling nations act, the resumption of commercial whaling is all but inevitable. The sense of imminent crisis is back – the website of the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society (WDCS) features an image of a life-size whale, warning that: “This might be the last life-size whale you will ever see.”
Yet all three of the apparent ‘bad guys’ have elements of their environmental records that could be applauded. So why do they continue
to pursue a policy that causes such widespread condemnation? Money would seem to be the obvious answer, but when it comes to whaling, the economics don’t always add up.As with anything related to the whaling debate, establishing the economic facts can be difficult. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the official line is unfailingly optimistic. According to Iceland’s representative at the IWC, Stefan Asmundsson, there is “no question” that whale meat – now the only product derived from whaling – sells and is popular.
But Arni Finnsson, a campaigner at the Iceland Nature Conservation Association, paints a different picture. “There is a small market for minke whale meat in Iceland, but it probably amounts to no more than five, ten or 15 animals per annum – it’s simply not profitable,” he explains. “Back in August 2003, the year Iceland began scientific whaling, the scientists and whalers were supposed to pay their own salaries through the proceeds of the whaling, but by 2004, this had already changed, when they negotiated a salary because they couldn’t sell enough meat to make a living.”Then there’s the mystery of Iceland’s shrinking whales. In 2003, Finnsson says, each minke whale caught provided an average of 972 kilograms of meat – by last year, this had been reduced to 466 kilos. “It suggests that the whalers are throwing an increasing share of each whale back into the ocean because the market isn’t asking for whale meat unless it’s the ‘best’ or most palatable part of the whale,” says Finnsson.Greenpeace accuses Norway of the same practice. “They don’t have anywhere near the market for the amount of whales they are harvesting,” says oceans campaigner Willie Mackenzie – and there have long been stories of blubber mountains in Norway that are earmarked for export to Japan. Similarly, Icelandic whalers are looking to Japan as a future market. Last year, Iceland killed seven fin whales, even though, according to Finnsson, Icelanders have never eaten this type of whale meat – the whaling company was apparently hoping to export it to Japan, but the Japanese market remains closed, and the meat is currently languishing in Icelandic freezers.With Japan increasingly powerful in the IWC, those holding the purse strings in Iceland and Norway may well believe there is a boom in whale trade on the horizon. However, the parlous state of Japan’s own whale meat market suggests there’s a flaw in this reasoning. The Japanese market peaked in 1962 with 220,000 tonnes of whale meat consumed. By 1987, when Japan began scientific whaling, 70 tonnes of the 1,873-tonne catch went unsold, and by last year, the Japan Times was reporting record levels of unsold whale meat, describing it as an industry “on life support”.
Official financial figures are difficult to come by – Hiroshi Aimoto, first secretary, Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries of Japan, responded in writing to Geographical, saying that: “It is difficult to estimate how much is spent on promoting whaling and whale meat because a number of organisations conduct
such activities,” but did assure us that sales of whale meat were on the rise, by as much as 60 per cent in the past year. But a Japanese source close to the whaling industry and very much on the pro-whaling side of the debate has told Geographical that they believe the industry is in crisis. According to our contact, scientific whaling costs the Japanese government 400 million yen (£1.7million) a year. However, the actual cost of the whaling industry, including transportation, PR and crew, amounts to about four billion yen. The gulf between these two figures has to be made up through sales of whale meat. However, our contact claims that poor sales and the shortfall in catches caused by a fire on the whaling ship Nishn Maru have caused a deficit of about two billion yen. This cost has to be covered by a private company – Kyodo Senpaku – and our contact believes that the situation is so dire that the company may soon have to cut down on the number of vessels used and whales taken.
Cultural connections
With the commercial gains from whaling evidently slim at best, it seems that there must be more at stake to persuade these nations to brave the bad press that comes with it. The supporters of whaling often justify the practice by arguing that it’s an intrinsic part of their culture, yet the real history often seems to tell a different story.“We have this connection with whaling that goes back many hundreds of years,” says Asmundsson. “The Icelandic word for great fortune, hvalreki, means it’s like a whale being beached on your beach. It’s part of our diet and has been part of our culture since there has been an Icelandic people.”
Yet as a locally run industry, commercial whaling only began in Iceland after the Second World War. “Icelanders through the centuries weren’t engaged in whaling like the Basques, Norwegians, British or Americans,” says Finnsson. “During the late 19th century, these countries came to Iceland and set up whaling stations, but the Icelanders themselves were never involved to any great scale – at most, they were eating whale meat from animals that were stranded on beaches.”
Similarly, Japanese pro-whaling PR paints a picture of a country steeped in whaling tradition, but others have their doubts. “What I find
most interesting is that this is a relatively recent phenomenon,” says Ian Miller, assistant professor of Japanese history at Arizona University. “The Japanese have been whaling since at least the 16th century, but the linkage of national identity to whaling is largely a product of the post-Second World War era.” Miller explains that after the war, Japan was devastated and protein was in short supply. General MacArthur, leader of the occupying US forces, ordered the Japanese
to hunt whales, and whale meat was provided in massive quantities for school lunches.“You have a whole generation of people who associate whale meat with their childhood,” says Miller. “And those people are now at an age where they are in positions of power and influence. It has become a totem of times gone past for them, and an object of nostalgia – they think back to better times, as of course we all do. It just happens that in this instance those times involve whaling.”
This link between whaling and national identity gives nationalists in all three whaling nations fertile grounds to campaign upon. Whaling is portrayed as a question of national sovereignty – as Finnsson explains, in Iceland, the pro-whaling lobby has created the impression that it’s ‘Iceland against the world’. There is a macho element to it: “If you ask an Icelander if they support or oppose whaling, its a little bit like asking them whether they are a man or a mouse – are you a real Icelander or are you a wimp?” says Vassili Papastavrou, a whale biologist who works for the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW). “They don’t hear
the real question, they just hear it in terms of patriotism and nationalism.”
Fears over food security, particularly Japan’s reliance on imports of foreign protein have also added impetus to the pro-whaling cause. “Our self-sufficiency in terms of food is just 39 per cent, all other food is imported,” says Shigeko Misaki, a freelance journalist and former adviser to the Japan Whaling Association. “Since the 1986–87 season, there has been a shortage of the whale meat that used to provide young people with school lunches, and that has led to a change in dietary habits. We started to import beef; 562,000 tonnes per year are imported from the USA and Australia. This has provided a massive and very cheap meat supply, while at the same time, minke whale meat has become very rare and expensive. Therefore the Japanese people started to change their diet – during
the early 1970s, whale meat was 68 per cent of animal protein consumed in Japan. Now it is just 0.004 per cent. With the fisheries dwindling, the government realises this is a very dangerous situation, so whaling is a principal part of the symbolic revival of our fisheries.”
The symbolism is critical for Japanese pro-whaling politicians – in some respects, whaling has become the first line of defence in the battle to keep control of their fisheries. “The whaling nations see loss of control over their right to harvest marine mammals as the thin end of the wedge for being told how to manage other marine resources – there is a feeling that they need to take control of what they take out of the sea in order to ensure their food security,” says Claire Bass a campaigner at the World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA). Whaling, it seems, has become a way of distracting attention from serious concerns about overfishing of other species, such as the seriously depleted bluefin tuna coveted by the Japanese, or the cod that forms the heart of the Icelandic fishing economy. “In the Icelandic trawling community there is a growing sense of alarm, even desperation, that unless they go whaling, the NGOs will come after Iceland on fisheries,” says Finnsson. “This is one of the two key arguments that helped scare the Icelandic people and gain support for whaling.”
Save the fish
The other argument that Finnsson identifies as effective for Icelandic pro-whalers is the same one that Japan has been pushing for the past
five or six years, namely, that whales eat too many fish. The Whale Hunters, a 2001 film by Jeremy Bristow, a producer at the BBC Natural History Unit, documents the public unveiling of this new line of attack: at press conferences, countless photographs of sliced-open whale stomachs full of fish were shown to the media – fish that the Japanese scientists said should have been eaten by the Japanese people. But this argument gets short shrift with marine scientists. “No serious fisheries biologist would say that whales are responsible for the depletion of the world’s fisheries; everyone knows that it’s over-fishing,” says Papastavrou. There is another scientific justification for whaling that forms the backbone of the whaling nations’ official policy – that is that if whales can be hunted sustainably, why shouldn’t it be done? According to Japan, there are plenty of minke whales out there – Mr Aimoto told us there are “more than one million minke whales worldwide”. While this figure has been contested, it’s generally agreed that minke whales aren’t endangered.
Icelandic officials are similarly confident their hunts are sustainable. “We follow the principle that there is nothing wrong with utilising resources if it’s done in a sustainable way,” says Asmundsson. “I would like to stress that the issue has absolutely nothing to do with the protection of endangered species – nobody argues that. We are only hunting stocks that are abundant.”
Taken at face value, official figures appear to back him up. The IWC’s 2001 population estimates suggest that there were 30,000 fin whales and 174,000 minke whales in the North Atlantic. Since it began scientific whaling in 2003, Iceland has ‘taken’ 200 animals, and in last year’s commercial hunt, one minke and seven fin whales were taken. These don’t sound like the kind of numbers that would unbalance these whale populations, but anti-whalers argue that there’s a fundamental flaw in the way that whales are counted. At present, an area of sea is taken and an estimate of the number of whales in that area is made. But this doesn’t reveal anything about the different whale populations within that area – whales live in small groups with different breeding and feeding grounds
and are arguably more vulnerable than the total population figure would suggest. “I think there is a misapprehension that whales – and the minke whales around Antarctica are a great example of this – are all one population,” says Mark Simmonds, the WDCS’s director of science. “I think it’s fairly clear they are not and they therefore need to be conserved as distinct units. What’s probably happened in the past is that we’ve knocked out whole populations without realising we were doing it.”But it’s that root of all evil, money, that is most commonly cited as the key reason that commercial whale hunting could never be sustainable. “All whaling started on abundant species,” says Papastavrou, “but the commercial pressures to continue exploitation were so great that they overrode any other concern.”
Seeking sustainability
With this arsenal of arguments at the anti-whalers’ fingertips, the actual science behind the sustainability debate rarely emerges. Yet there are credible scientists who argue that a sustainable whale hunt would be scientifically possible. Professor Philip Hammond is a marine mammal scientist at St Andrews University and represents the UK on the scientific committee of the IWC. During the early 1990s, Hammond, as the committee’s chairman, was deeply involved in the creation of the Revised Management Procedure (RMP), a scientifically advanced method of creating quotas that, if followed correctly, would ensure that whaling could be sustainable. Although the RMP is yet to be put into practice, Hammond remains convinced that it provides a scientific template that would allow the resumption of commercial whaling without endangering the whales.“Anyone who knows and understands the RMP will tell you it’s incredibly conservative – it typically sets catches at no more than 0.5 per cent of abundance,” explains Hammond. “The arguments against the RMP are 99 per cent technical, political, social and economic; the science is sound. Over the years, the whaling debate has been extremely politicised and polarised – politics has always influenced the science behind the management of whaling, but the issue has now evolved to a point where on both sides, it’s considered completely acceptable to bring politics into the science.”
It’s also clear that over the years, the debate has evolved to the point where in anti-whaling nations such as the UK, voices such as Hammond’s that appear to question the anti-whaling position are usually drowned out. We have developed an anti-whaling reflex – it may be entirely justified, but when scientists such as Hammond state that whaling could be sustainable, that there are scientific reasons to believe it wouldn’t endanger the whales, it seems appropriate to ask why we’re so against whaling.The public perception of the whaling debate was moulded during the 1970s, when activists recognised that many whale populations had been hunted to the brink of extinction. “The 1970s was a turning point,” says Miller. “Whales got a personality, they got a face, they became something we could identify with at the same time as issues such as Vietnam, Watergate, the oil crisis and recession were at the forefront of people’s minds. Western modernity broadly writ had been thrown into crisis and people were looking for alternatives.”
Whaling became a ‘just cause’, a clear way of supporting something widely perceived to be absolute good in a society that was beginning
to question itself. And as a campaign, ‘Save the Whale’ was very successful. “The challenge for those on the activist side of any environmental
issue is how to cultivate or popularise a sense of ecological or environmental responsibility,” says Miller. “And one way to do that is to give an issue a face or personality that people identify with and then create a sense of crisis around that personality. Whaling is a good example of what happens when you cultivate a sense of crisis – there’s nothing more final than extinction.”
Professor Arne Kalland of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Oslo, Norway, argues that whales are seen as special animals, put into a higher class than other mammals, such as cows or pigs. They have, he says, been turned into totem animals, symbols that embody a wider set of values. As we know relatively little about what happens under the sea, Kalland argues that it has been easy to create myths around whales, leading to the creation of what he calls the “Super Whale: our relative in the water”.
Noting that anti-whalers often speak of ‘the whale’ in the singular, Kalland sees the Super Whale as an amalgamation of the best characteristics of all 75-plus species of whale. It’s large like the blue whale, sings like the humpback, has a large brain like the sperm whale (although Kalland notes that the sperm whale’s brain is actually small compared to its body size) and is intelligent and sociable like the bottlenose dolphin. In addition, Super Whale has human traits – as Miller says, “We’ve endowed whales with all the qualities we wish to see in ourselves: kindness, caring, intelligence, playfulness.”
With this sacred ‘Super Whale’ an embodiment of absolute good, anyone against it can be branded as evil. So the whalers become barbarians: Kalland quotes a 1991 Daily Star front cover – above an image of a Japanese man eating whale meat, it reads “Sickest dinner ever served”, while the headline screams “Japs Feast on Whale – VIPS tuck into its raw flesh”. Eating whale is seen as tantamount to cannibalism and, as Kalland notes, the ethnic pejorative ‘Jap’ would usually be reserved for times of war – this attack on a totem animal legitimises otherwise taboo language.This process continues today. Sea Shepherd, the radical anti-whaling organisation routinely refers to the whalers as ‘murderers’ and worse, while even mainstream anti-whaling rhetoric works hard to maintain a sense of crisis. The WDCS has been running a campaign ‘100 Days to Save the Whale’, with a countdown in days, hours, minutes and seconds to the date of this year’s IWC meeting. The message from WDCS and other NGOs is that if nothing is done, we’re going to return to the bad old days of uncontrollable commercial whaling, yet elsewhere, the same organisations tell us that there is no market for whale meat anywhere. On both sides, the debate has developed it’s own wayward logic, with arguments stacked upon each other in order to justify a particular position.There is a danger that this process prevents any real, objective analysis of the issue – we are preconditioned to believe that whaling is bad in a way that the killing and eating of other animals isn’t. “This has become an all-or-nothing debate,” says Miller, “a very stark moral decision – that is, do we kill these animals or not? And that fits into a much longer history of using the way that we treat animals as a gauge of civilised behaviour.”
Kalland is more explicit, accusing anti-whaling nations of cultural imperialism, of having a “missionary attitude”; while Hindu’s tolerate the eating of beef by others, anti-whalers condemn and seek to prohibit the eating of whale. But there are arguments that suggest that whales are indeed different – intelligent, higher species that rank alongside the primates in terms of their emotional, mental and social abilities. But the science on this isn’t conclusive – while some whale species are undoubtedly ancient, highly evolved and capable of exhibiting apparently intelligent behaviour, it’s surprising how little we really know about them. “It’s popularly believed that all whales are super-intelligent, but we only really know much about the social behaviour of toothed cetaceans, such as the bottlenose dolphin, which are easier to study,” says Hammond. “The baleen whales are very different – they are not social in the same way that dolphins are.”
Intolerable cruelty
For many, the problem is what they see as whaling’s inherent cruelty. Whales are killed by an explosive harpoon, designed to stun or kill the whale, while at the same time releasing prongs that anchor themselves to the animal, allowing it to be winched aboard the whaling vessel. Images of blood-red seas and stricken whales dangling from the sides of ships all create an impression of cruelty, and it’s an impression that many believe is backed up by reality.“Our strapline at WSPA [World Society for the Protection of Animals] is that there’s no humane way to kill a whale at sea,” says Claire Bass, a WSPA campaigner. “Killing an animal for a commercial venture with the equivalent of a hand grenade and letting it bleed to death is just not something a modern, developed society should be considering condoning.”
Some pro-whalers concede that the welfare arguments can be difficult to counter. They roll out statistics – Norwegian scientist Egil Øen claims that 80 per cent of whales die or lose consciousness instantly – yet there’s little doubt that some whales do suffer painful deaths, while little is known of what becomes of the ‘struck and lost’ whales that escape the harpoons and disappear into the deep. But the whaling nations do seem to have a strong case when they accuse the anti-whaling nations of environmental hypocrisy. The same governments that condemn whaling actively promote the vast global beef industry, for example, where animals are routinely castrated, dehorned and hot-iron banded without anaesthetic, where forests are clear cut for grazing and where the vast amount of organic waste is a major cause of water pollution. “There’s a deep contradiction at the centre of the public debate,” says Miller. “This relatively minor practice of killing animals in the wild, in carefully monitored numbers, compared to the archipelago of factory farms that puts meat on our tables every day – it’s a distraction from a much more important set of debates about the mass handling of animals in captivity. I often fear that by focusing on these sorts of debates, we allow meat-eating people to get of the hook, we allow ourselves to feel good and say ‘Well, I gave money to Greenpeace’, but we need to be asking much more important questions about the way in which we live today.”
June 2007
While the whaling nations have so far failed to end the moratorium – anti-whalers have held the balance of power at the IWC for the past few decades – the whaling nations have found ways to keep the industry alive. Norway and Iceland have registered official objections, enabling them to argue that their commercial hunts are perfectly legal. Along with Japan, they also hunt whales in the name of science, which is allowed under article eight of the IWC convention. Each year, the pro- and anti-whaling nations slug it out at the IWC meeting and, in recent years, Japan has upped the ante, embarking on a vigorous campaign to recruit new countries to the commission that are sympathetic to its cause. It has been widely accused of buying votes with fisheries aid, and although they deny this, their support is such that last year, Japan won its first vote since the moratorium, passing a motion that the IWC should consider the resumption of commercial whaling and sending shockwaves through the anti-whaling community. The fear now is that at this year’s IWC meeting, Japan will have a simple majority on a number of votes. And while this wouldn’t be enough to overturn the moratorium (three quarters of the vote is needed) it could tip the scales in the whalers’ favour, with key votes on aboriginal whaling rights likely to give the whalers additional bargaining powers.
Imminent crisis
Campaigners warn that unless anti-whaling nations act, the resumption of commercial whaling is all but inevitable. The sense of imminent crisis is back – the website of the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society (WDCS) features an image of a life-size whale, warning that: “This might be the last life-size whale you will ever see.”
Yet all three of the apparent ‘bad guys’ have elements of their environmental records that could be applauded. So why do they continue
to pursue a policy that causes such widespread condemnation? Money would seem to be the obvious answer, but when it comes to whaling, the economics don’t always add up.As with anything related to the whaling debate, establishing the economic facts can be difficult. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the official line is unfailingly optimistic. According to Iceland’s representative at the IWC, Stefan Asmundsson, there is “no question” that whale meat – now the only product derived from whaling – sells and is popular.
But Arni Finnsson, a campaigner at the Iceland Nature Conservation Association, paints a different picture. “There is a small market for minke whale meat in Iceland, but it probably amounts to no more than five, ten or 15 animals per annum – it’s simply not profitable,” he explains. “Back in August 2003, the year Iceland began scientific whaling, the scientists and whalers were supposed to pay their own salaries through the proceeds of the whaling, but by 2004, this had already changed, when they negotiated a salary because they couldn’t sell enough meat to make a living.”Then there’s the mystery of Iceland’s shrinking whales. In 2003, Finnsson says, each minke whale caught provided an average of 972 kilograms of meat – by last year, this had been reduced to 466 kilos. “It suggests that the whalers are throwing an increasing share of each whale back into the ocean because the market isn’t asking for whale meat unless it’s the ‘best’ or most palatable part of the whale,” says Finnsson.Greenpeace accuses Norway of the same practice. “They don’t have anywhere near the market for the amount of whales they are harvesting,” says oceans campaigner Willie Mackenzie – and there have long been stories of blubber mountains in Norway that are earmarked for export to Japan. Similarly, Icelandic whalers are looking to Japan as a future market. Last year, Iceland killed seven fin whales, even though, according to Finnsson, Icelanders have never eaten this type of whale meat – the whaling company was apparently hoping to export it to Japan, but the Japanese market remains closed, and the meat is currently languishing in Icelandic freezers.With Japan increasingly powerful in the IWC, those holding the purse strings in Iceland and Norway may well believe there is a boom in whale trade on the horizon. However, the parlous state of Japan’s own whale meat market suggests there’s a flaw in this reasoning. The Japanese market peaked in 1962 with 220,000 tonnes of whale meat consumed. By 1987, when Japan began scientific whaling, 70 tonnes of the 1,873-tonne catch went unsold, and by last year, the Japan Times was reporting record levels of unsold whale meat, describing it as an industry “on life support”.
Official financial figures are difficult to come by – Hiroshi Aimoto, first secretary, Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries of Japan, responded in writing to Geographical, saying that: “It is difficult to estimate how much is spent on promoting whaling and whale meat because a number of organisations conduct
such activities,” but did assure us that sales of whale meat were on the rise, by as much as 60 per cent in the past year. But a Japanese source close to the whaling industry and very much on the pro-whaling side of the debate has told Geographical that they believe the industry is in crisis. According to our contact, scientific whaling costs the Japanese government 400 million yen (£1.7million) a year. However, the actual cost of the whaling industry, including transportation, PR and crew, amounts to about four billion yen. The gulf between these two figures has to be made up through sales of whale meat. However, our contact claims that poor sales and the shortfall in catches caused by a fire on the whaling ship Nishn Maru have caused a deficit of about two billion yen. This cost has to be covered by a private company – Kyodo Senpaku – and our contact believes that the situation is so dire that the company may soon have to cut down on the number of vessels used and whales taken.
Cultural connections
With the commercial gains from whaling evidently slim at best, it seems that there must be more at stake to persuade these nations to brave the bad press that comes with it. The supporters of whaling often justify the practice by arguing that it’s an intrinsic part of their culture, yet the real history often seems to tell a different story.“We have this connection with whaling that goes back many hundreds of years,” says Asmundsson. “The Icelandic word for great fortune, hvalreki, means it’s like a whale being beached on your beach. It’s part of our diet and has been part of our culture since there has been an Icelandic people.”
Yet as a locally run industry, commercial whaling only began in Iceland after the Second World War. “Icelanders through the centuries weren’t engaged in whaling like the Basques, Norwegians, British or Americans,” says Finnsson. “During the late 19th century, these countries came to Iceland and set up whaling stations, but the Icelanders themselves were never involved to any great scale – at most, they were eating whale meat from animals that were stranded on beaches.”
Similarly, Japanese pro-whaling PR paints a picture of a country steeped in whaling tradition, but others have their doubts. “What I find
most interesting is that this is a relatively recent phenomenon,” says Ian Miller, assistant professor of Japanese history at Arizona University. “The Japanese have been whaling since at least the 16th century, but the linkage of national identity to whaling is largely a product of the post-Second World War era.” Miller explains that after the war, Japan was devastated and protein was in short supply. General MacArthur, leader of the occupying US forces, ordered the Japanese
to hunt whales, and whale meat was provided in massive quantities for school lunches.“You have a whole generation of people who associate whale meat with their childhood,” says Miller. “And those people are now at an age where they are in positions of power and influence. It has become a totem of times gone past for them, and an object of nostalgia – they think back to better times, as of course we all do. It just happens that in this instance those times involve whaling.”
This link between whaling and national identity gives nationalists in all three whaling nations fertile grounds to campaign upon. Whaling is portrayed as a question of national sovereignty – as Finnsson explains, in Iceland, the pro-whaling lobby has created the impression that it’s ‘Iceland against the world’. There is a macho element to it: “If you ask an Icelander if they support or oppose whaling, its a little bit like asking them whether they are a man or a mouse – are you a real Icelander or are you a wimp?” says Vassili Papastavrou, a whale biologist who works for the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW). “They don’t hear
the real question, they just hear it in terms of patriotism and nationalism.”
Fears over food security, particularly Japan’s reliance on imports of foreign protein have also added impetus to the pro-whaling cause. “Our self-sufficiency in terms of food is just 39 per cent, all other food is imported,” says Shigeko Misaki, a freelance journalist and former adviser to the Japan Whaling Association. “Since the 1986–87 season, there has been a shortage of the whale meat that used to provide young people with school lunches, and that has led to a change in dietary habits. We started to import beef; 562,000 tonnes per year are imported from the USA and Australia. This has provided a massive and very cheap meat supply, while at the same time, minke whale meat has become very rare and expensive. Therefore the Japanese people started to change their diet – during
the early 1970s, whale meat was 68 per cent of animal protein consumed in Japan. Now it is just 0.004 per cent. With the fisheries dwindling, the government realises this is a very dangerous situation, so whaling is a principal part of the symbolic revival of our fisheries.”
The symbolism is critical for Japanese pro-whaling politicians – in some respects, whaling has become the first line of defence in the battle to keep control of their fisheries. “The whaling nations see loss of control over their right to harvest marine mammals as the thin end of the wedge for being told how to manage other marine resources – there is a feeling that they need to take control of what they take out of the sea in order to ensure their food security,” says Claire Bass a campaigner at the World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA). Whaling, it seems, has become a way of distracting attention from serious concerns about overfishing of other species, such as the seriously depleted bluefin tuna coveted by the Japanese, or the cod that forms the heart of the Icelandic fishing economy. “In the Icelandic trawling community there is a growing sense of alarm, even desperation, that unless they go whaling, the NGOs will come after Iceland on fisheries,” says Finnsson. “This is one of the two key arguments that helped scare the Icelandic people and gain support for whaling.”
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Save the fish
The other argument that Finnsson identifies as effective for Icelandic pro-whalers is the same one that Japan has been pushing for the past
five or six years, namely, that whales eat too many fish. The Whale Hunters, a 2001 film by Jeremy Bristow, a producer at the BBC Natural History Unit, documents the public unveiling of this new line of attack: at press conferences, countless photographs of sliced-open whale stomachs full of fish were shown to the media – fish that the Japanese scientists said should have been eaten by the Japanese people. But this argument gets short shrift with marine scientists. “No serious fisheries biologist would say that whales are responsible for the depletion of the world’s fisheries; everyone knows that it’s over-fishing,” says Papastavrou. There is another scientific justification for whaling that forms the backbone of the whaling nations’ official policy – that is that if whales can be hunted sustainably, why shouldn’t it be done? According to Japan, there are plenty of minke whales out there – Mr Aimoto told us there are “more than one million minke whales worldwide”. While this figure has been contested, it’s generally agreed that minke whales aren’t endangered.
Icelandic officials are similarly confident their hunts are sustainable. “We follow the principle that there is nothing wrong with utilising resources if it’s done in a sustainable way,” says Asmundsson. “I would like to stress that the issue has absolutely nothing to do with the protection of endangered species – nobody argues that. We are only hunting stocks that are abundant.”
Taken at face value, official figures appear to back him up. The IWC’s 2001 population estimates suggest that there were 30,000 fin whales and 174,000 minke whales in the North Atlantic. Since it began scientific whaling in 2003, Iceland has ‘taken’ 200 animals, and in last year’s commercial hunt, one minke and seven fin whales were taken. These don’t sound like the kind of numbers that would unbalance these whale populations, but anti-whalers argue that there’s a fundamental flaw in the way that whales are counted. At present, an area of sea is taken and an estimate of the number of whales in that area is made. But this doesn’t reveal anything about the different whale populations within that area – whales live in small groups with different breeding and feeding grounds
and are arguably more vulnerable than the total population figure would suggest. “I think there is a misapprehension that whales – and the minke whales around Antarctica are a great example of this – are all one population,” says Mark Simmonds, the WDCS’s director of science. “I think it’s fairly clear they are not and they therefore need to be conserved as distinct units. What’s probably happened in the past is that we’ve knocked out whole populations without realising we were doing it.”But it’s that root of all evil, money, that is most commonly cited as the key reason that commercial whale hunting could never be sustainable. “All whaling started on abundant species,” says Papastavrou, “but the commercial pressures to continue exploitation were so great that they overrode any other concern.”
Seeking sustainability
With this arsenal of arguments at the anti-whalers’ fingertips, the actual science behind the sustainability debate rarely emerges. Yet there are credible scientists who argue that a sustainable whale hunt would be scientifically possible. Professor Philip Hammond is a marine mammal scientist at St Andrews University and represents the UK on the scientific committee of the IWC. During the early 1990s, Hammond, as the committee’s chairman, was deeply involved in the creation of the Revised Management Procedure (RMP), a scientifically advanced method of creating quotas that, if followed correctly, would ensure that whaling could be sustainable. Although the RMP is yet to be put into practice, Hammond remains convinced that it provides a scientific template that would allow the resumption of commercial whaling without endangering the whales.“Anyone who knows and understands the RMP will tell you it’s incredibly conservative – it typically sets catches at no more than 0.5 per cent of abundance,” explains Hammond. “The arguments against the RMP are 99 per cent technical, political, social and economic; the science is sound. Over the years, the whaling debate has been extremely politicised and polarised – politics has always influenced the science behind the management of whaling, but the issue has now evolved to a point where on both sides, it’s considered completely acceptable to bring politics into the science.”
It’s also clear that over the years, the debate has evolved to the point where in anti-whaling nations such as the UK, voices such as Hammond’s that appear to question the anti-whaling position are usually drowned out. We have developed an anti-whaling reflex – it may be entirely justified, but when scientists such as Hammond state that whaling could be sustainable, that there are scientific reasons to believe it wouldn’t endanger the whales, it seems appropriate to ask why we’re so against whaling.The public perception of the whaling debate was moulded during the 1970s, when activists recognised that many whale populations had been hunted to the brink of extinction. “The 1970s was a turning point,” says Miller. “Whales got a personality, they got a face, they became something we could identify with at the same time as issues such as Vietnam, Watergate, the oil crisis and recession were at the forefront of people’s minds. Western modernity broadly writ had been thrown into crisis and people were looking for alternatives.”
Whaling became a ‘just cause’, a clear way of supporting something widely perceived to be absolute good in a society that was beginning
to question itself. And as a campaign, ‘Save the Whale’ was very successful. “The challenge for those on the activist side of any environmental
issue is how to cultivate or popularise a sense of ecological or environmental responsibility,” says Miller. “And one way to do that is to give an issue a face or personality that people identify with and then create a sense of crisis around that personality. Whaling is a good example of what happens when you cultivate a sense of crisis – there’s nothing more final than extinction.”
Professor Arne Kalland of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Oslo, Norway, argues that whales are seen as special animals, put into a higher class than other mammals, such as cows or pigs. They have, he says, been turned into totem animals, symbols that embody a wider set of values. As we know relatively little about what happens under the sea, Kalland argues that it has been easy to create myths around whales, leading to the creation of what he calls the “Super Whale: our relative in the water”.
Noting that anti-whalers often speak of ‘the whale’ in the singular, Kalland sees the Super Whale as an amalgamation of the best characteristics of all 75-plus species of whale. It’s large like the blue whale, sings like the humpback, has a large brain like the sperm whale (although Kalland notes that the sperm whale’s brain is actually small compared to its body size) and is intelligent and sociable like the bottlenose dolphin. In addition, Super Whale has human traits – as Miller says, “We’ve endowed whales with all the qualities we wish to see in ourselves: kindness, caring, intelligence, playfulness.”
With this sacred ‘Super Whale’ an embodiment of absolute good, anyone against it can be branded as evil. So the whalers become barbarians: Kalland quotes a 1991 Daily Star front cover – above an image of a Japanese man eating whale meat, it reads “Sickest dinner ever served”, while the headline screams “Japs Feast on Whale – VIPS tuck into its raw flesh”. Eating whale is seen as tantamount to cannibalism and, as Kalland notes, the ethnic pejorative ‘Jap’ would usually be reserved for times of war – this attack on a totem animal legitimises otherwise taboo language.This process continues today. Sea Shepherd, the radical anti-whaling organisation routinely refers to the whalers as ‘murderers’ and worse, while even mainstream anti-whaling rhetoric works hard to maintain a sense of crisis. The WDCS has been running a campaign ‘100 Days to Save the Whale’, with a countdown in days, hours, minutes and seconds to the date of this year’s IWC meeting. The message from WDCS and other NGOs is that if nothing is done, we’re going to return to the bad old days of uncontrollable commercial whaling, yet elsewhere, the same organisations tell us that there is no market for whale meat anywhere. On both sides, the debate has developed it’s own wayward logic, with arguments stacked upon each other in order to justify a particular position.There is a danger that this process prevents any real, objective analysis of the issue – we are preconditioned to believe that whaling is bad in a way that the killing and eating of other animals isn’t. “This has become an all-or-nothing debate,” says Miller, “a very stark moral decision – that is, do we kill these animals or not? And that fits into a much longer history of using the way that we treat animals as a gauge of civilised behaviour.”
Kalland is more explicit, accusing anti-whaling nations of cultural imperialism, of having a “missionary attitude”; while Hindu’s tolerate the eating of beef by others, anti-whalers condemn and seek to prohibit the eating of whale. But there are arguments that suggest that whales are indeed different – intelligent, higher species that rank alongside the primates in terms of their emotional, mental and social abilities. But the science on this isn’t conclusive – while some whale species are undoubtedly ancient, highly evolved and capable of exhibiting apparently intelligent behaviour, it’s surprising how little we really know about them. “It’s popularly believed that all whales are super-intelligent, but we only really know much about the social behaviour of toothed cetaceans, such as the bottlenose dolphin, which are easier to study,” says Hammond. “The baleen whales are very different – they are not social in the same way that dolphins are.”
Intolerable cruelty
For many, the problem is what they see as whaling’s inherent cruelty. Whales are killed by an explosive harpoon, designed to stun or kill the whale, while at the same time releasing prongs that anchor themselves to the animal, allowing it to be winched aboard the whaling vessel. Images of blood-red seas and stricken whales dangling from the sides of ships all create an impression of cruelty, and it’s an impression that many believe is backed up by reality.“Our strapline at WSPA [World Society for the Protection of Animals] is that there’s no humane way to kill a whale at sea,” says Claire Bass, a WSPA campaigner. “Killing an animal for a commercial venture with the equivalent of a hand grenade and letting it bleed to death is just not something a modern, developed society should be considering condoning.”
Some pro-whalers concede that the welfare arguments can be difficult to counter. They roll out statistics – Norwegian scientist Egil Øen claims that 80 per cent of whales die or lose consciousness instantly – yet there’s little doubt that some whales do suffer painful deaths, while little is known of what becomes of the ‘struck and lost’ whales that escape the harpoons and disappear into the deep. But the whaling nations do seem to have a strong case when they accuse the anti-whaling nations of environmental hypocrisy. The same governments that condemn whaling actively promote the vast global beef industry, for example, where animals are routinely castrated, dehorned and hot-iron banded without anaesthetic, where forests are clear cut for grazing and where the vast amount of organic waste is a major cause of water pollution. “There’s a deep contradiction at the centre of the public debate,” says Miller. “This relatively minor practice of killing animals in the wild, in carefully monitored numbers, compared to the archipelago of factory farms that puts meat on our tables every day – it’s a distraction from a much more important set of debates about the mass handling of animals in captivity. I often fear that by focusing on these sorts of debates, we allow meat-eating people to get of the hook, we allow ourselves to feel good and say ‘Well, I gave money to Greenpeace’, but we need to be asking much more important questions about the way in which we live today.”
June 2007
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