What we're doing wrong
“Scientific whaling”
6th September 2008
Japan's “scientific whaling” program amounts to the “prostitution of science – using science as an excuse to kill whales.”
A controversial study published in the journal Polar Biology says minke whales are losing weight because of global warming: Their food supply, krill in the Antarctic, is declining as sea ice shrinks. Among the problems with the research, critics say, is that it used tissue from whales killed by the Japanese “scientific whaling” program, founded in 1986 when the International Whaling Commission (IWC) banned commercial hunts.
Opponents of the Japanese program say it is a facade for commercial hunting and fear this new study would lend it credibility. In particular, they are suspicious of the authors’ claim that competition for food from humpback whales may be contributing to minke weight loss – the Japanese have been hoping to resume hunting humpback whales now that their numbers have rebounded.
Professor Lars Walloe, co-author of the study and head of the Norwegian delegation to the IWC, defended the methodology, saying the blubber measurements could be obtained only by killing the animals. He agrees that “there is a commercial aspect to the Japanese scientific program,” but he says there is “no reason to keep the ban – there are large numbers of minke.”
Hal Whitehead, an expert on whale ecology and behaviour at Dalhousie University in Halifax, says biologists can measure the thickness of right whale blubber using ultrasound. “We are almost always able to find ways to study whales without killing them – it just takes ingenuity and time,” he says, adding that Japan’s “scientific whaling” program amounts to the “prostitution of science – using science as an excuse to kill whales.”
Though he does agree with Prof Walloe on at least one count: Canada’s seal hunt shares similarities with Japan’s whale hunt. “Many more animals are killed in our hunt then in all commercial whaling hunts put together,” says Prof Whitehead.
In any case, it is not necessarily advisable to eat whale meat in the first place: their tissues contain high levels of pollutants, like PCBs, linked to health effects in children in the Arctic and the Faroe islands.
Published in The Green Report in The Globe and Mail
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