Damn, Ghost, do you know anything about whales? There can be no sustainable whaling, it is a biological impossibility, just as it is with shark fishing. They reproduce too infrequently, grow up too slowly and invest too much energy in raising their young for commercial whaling to be anything than an unmitigated disaster. Just like it was last time.
from Beddington & May, 1982, in Evans, 1987
It's pretty dire, some of these species were saved in the nick of time. Now, yes, they have been recovering in the past twenty years, but are nowhere near pre-whaling populations. I mean, what was this pretence about banning whaling for them to recover if we don't actually plan on letting them do just that? They pull the same crap with fish stock recovery as well, but they don't have the same PR as whales.
Japan is so dishonest about its whaling. They claim "scientific purposes," but that's bullshit. Checking out the
ISI Web of Knowledge database for papers on cetaceans published in 2006, there were 488 worldwide, only 0.8%, or 2, came either from Japan or required the slaughtering of the animal.
They lost yet another argument last year (which was studying their diet- the most counter-intuitive concept I've ever come across in marine biology) when a method for studying the whale's faeces was developed. Whales don't have to die in the mockery of conservation that Japan has failed to deceive us with.
You may notice from that graph that minke populations increased. Being the smallest of the baleen whales they were not targeted during the bloodied age of whaling like the others were, and the lack of competition from other whales allowed them to grow more numerous, not that this has gone unnoticed and unexploited since then.
South Korea also whales in the Sea of Japan. If you catch a minke by accident and you report the by-catch, you can legally sell the meat. Between 1999 and 2003, fishermen reported 458 whales. Researchers bought whale meat from several markets during this period and genetically analysed it to see how many minkes the meat came from. To cut a long story short, more than 800 minkes had hit the market. Since one whale can go for $100,000, it's a stretch to believe that these are all accidental. The upshot? Another form of unregulated whaling.
- Fields, National Geographic Dec. 2007