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Brandon Cole

MANY quarrels divide nations, but few do so with the ferocity that characterises the war between those who want to hunt whales and those who would see the practice stopped. The front line in this long-running war is the International Whaling Commission (IWC), a multilateral organisation—part industry regulator, part conservation body—from whose trenches pro- and anti-whalers hurl insults at each other year after year.

In some years it is the pro-whalers who inch forward through the mud and carcasses of their fallen comrades. In 2001 whale-eating Iceland rejoined the commission (it had left in a huff in 1992), boosting morale among manly hunter-gatherers like Norway and Japan. Other years find the anti-whalers creeping forward on their bellies, clutching green flags of conservation and environmentalism. But neither side seems capable of decisive progress. The past twelve months were thus fairly typical, with anti-whalers such as Britain, Australia and New Zealand trumpeting a new “Berlin initiative” to save the whale, just as Iceland returned to the hunt for the first time since 1989. Even if one side acquires some lasting advantage, a new stalemate can be achieved simply by the other side recruiting new allies to its cause. Set up in 1946 by the world's 14 main whaling countries, the IWC's membership has swelled to 51, and now includes such illustrious maritime powers as landlocked Switzerland (an anti-whaler) and Mongolia (a supporter).

The battle to save whales has not ended Jul 26th 2001 Japan’s defence of whaling Sep 7th 2000 When Indians go whaling Nov 19th 1998 Indians and whales Oct 30th 1997 A compromise for whales Oct 23rd 1997 The environment See the International Whaling Commission. Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund make the case against whaling. The Japan Whaling Association is of the opposite view. The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences publishes research on the effect of commercial whaling on the diets of killer whales.

Why does whaling arouse such passions? One argument that excites the anti-whalers is that whales are endangered, and that whaling therefore threatens their extinction. As Greenpeace, whose pioneering activism helped to secure the IWC's international moratorium on commercial whaling in 1986, declares in its fund-raising material: “The world's great whales are in trouble. A return to large-scale commercial whaling is just a hair's breadth away. We need your help!”

Seven of the 13 species of great whale, including the blue whale and the bowhead, are indeed considered endangered. But several—fin and Bryde's whales in some waters, and minke whales just about everywhere—are abundant. (In wonderfully inflammatory language, one Japanese bureaucrat has called minkes the “cockroaches of the sea”.) Iceland, Norway and Japan all contend that they want to catch only abundant species of whales. Norway counts 107,000 minke whales in its economic waters, and Iceland 43,000. Several hundred thousand more frolic happily in the southern Pacific. From this profusion of minkes, whose numbers grow at about 2-3% a year, Iceland takes 38 whales, Norway 711 and Japan up to 540.

Predatory these countries may be, but Iceland boasts some of the best marine-resource management policies in the world, which should not be surprising as fish products make up 70% (by value) of the country's exports of goods. Though Norway's fishing boats have a reputation for being pretty ruthless when it comes to salmon or sand eels, the Norwegian government is justifiably proud of the greenness of its policies, including those for fish-stock management. Even depraved Japan claims to have no desire to hunt the great whales to extinction.

AP

Not absolutely delicious, even unpolluted

Some anti-whalers appear to be in deep denial about these facts. At the IWC's meeting this year, for instance, Britain's fisheries minister, Elliot Morley, claimed that there were “no reliable stock estimates to suggest an abundant whale species”, thus contradicting the IWC's own scientists, who have endorsed the pro-whalers' estimates for the minke population. Richard Cowan, the chief bureaucrat on the British team, points out that Norway's estimate has fluctuated a bit, and dropped slightly recently. But that recent drop, suggests Halvard Johansen, Norway's senior official, may be because Britain childishly refused to let Norway count the minkes in the British sector of the North Sea, arguing that it would not be “in the best interests of the whales”.

Other activists, such as the World Wildlife Fund, appear to accept the evidence that the populations of certain species are recovering to healthier levels. Nevertheless, the WWF argues that it would be dangerous to allow the resumption of commercial whaling without first putting in place proper safeguards, and then ensuring they were administered by the IWC. This is a goal the whaling countries say they have been working towards for years but, thanks to the opposition of such countries as Britain, Australia and New Zealand, their efforts have been frustrated.

According to its charter, the IWC was set up to manage “the proper conservation of whale stocks and thus make possible the orderly development of the whaling industry”. In the years since the moratorium was imposed, the IWC's scientists have determined that in certain waters minke, fin, Gray and Bryde's whales are now abundant enough to be hunted commercially. They have also devised a conservative method for calculating catch limits. At first, the IWC's politically appointed commissioners refused to accept their findings, prompting the resignation of the scientific committee's British chairman, Philip Hammond, in 1993. Since then, the discussions have become bogged down over non-scientific issues, as the anti-whalers have frustrated all attempts to lift the moratorium. As justification for this behaviour, some anti-whaling governments talk about the IWC's “evolving” mandate. Mr Cowan suggests that one possible interpretation of the “orderly development of the whaling industry” is its “orderly running down to nothing”.

The anti-whalers' claim about the imminent return of “large-scale” commercial whaling, meanwhile, is badly misleading. Rapacious and uncontrolled commercial whaling (most notably by Britain and America in the 18th and 19th centuries) did indeed drive many species, such as the right whale and the sperm whale, close to extinction. But the whaling industry began its long decline more than 150 years ago, as demand for its products—which ranged from candles to lamp oil, corset whalebone, cosmetics and engine lubricants—evaporated with the appearance of petrochemicals, steel and plastics.

All that is left of this once-thriving business is the market for whalemeat and, on the available evidence, this market is small and stagnant. Whale is cheaper than beef in Norway. Yet, despite the Ministry of Fisheries' claim that whale “tastes delicious and is very healthy”, and despite the low prices at which Norway's modest catch is sold, it still has whalemeat left over for export. The Japanese, eager to resume whaling and by tradition a nation of whale-eaters, might be expected to be buyers, but they are not. They think Norwegian whalemeat contains too many pollutants to choke the stuff down.

They also think this of some Japanese-caught whales. But the Japanese anyway seem to have lost their taste for what was once a delicacy. Whalemeat is expensive in Japan, and little eaten. Only one restaurant in all of Tokyo, a gourmet's paradise, specialises in whale cuisine. No one seems to think the market will grow much, even if prices drop. The government organises national whale-eating days and special events. But the young prefer burgers.

Iceland remains optimistic about demand. Stefan Asmundsson, Iceland's chief whaling bureaucrat, talks enthusiastically about long-term plans for opening up markets such as America, once commercial whaling is “normalised”. To judge by the state of American public opinion, he may have quite a wait.

In reality, pollution, merchant shipping and commercial fishing all pose far greater threats to the world's whale populations than any likely commercial-whaling industry might. Even though it seems to recognise this, the WWF argues that such threats should only intensify opposition to commercial whaling, because that would add to the pressures that do exist. The whaling countries return to their theme that the IWC was set up to regulate commercial whaling, not marine pollutants or other environmental nastiness, that other international bodies deal specifically with these environmental problems and, most pertinently, that they do not alter the basic fact that some species are abundant. “Our opponents like to put themselves up as environmentalists,” says Iceland's Mr Asmundsson. “They are, of course, not. To be against the utilisation of an abundant stock is not environmentalism.”

The anti-whalers supplement their environmental objections with policies based on notions of animal welfare or animal rights. Writing to the New Scientist last September, New Zealand's commissioner to the IWC, Sir Geoffrey Palmer, said the arguments against killing whales were “scientific, moral and ethical”. “Our attitudes to whaling are not based entirely on scientific evidence,” agrees Britain's Mr Cowan. “We have a view that killing whales is inherently cruel.”

That, apparently, does not matter—at least to the IWC—if the killing is done by certain people, even if their prey is less than abundant: the IWC gives various “indigenous” groups, such as the American Inuit, permission to hunt a few whales belonging to endangered species, supposedly because such people have a need that others lack.

By contrast, every Norwegian whaling expedition must by law include a qualified vet. According to Norway's government, these vets report that 90% of the whales killed by its fishermen die instantly, as a grenade attached to the harpoon blows the brain apart. The remaining 10% are dispatched swiftly with the use of a rifle. Boats station themselves above the whales, the minkes surface and quickly die. Indeed, Norway has become so proficient at humane killing that the United States—which sometimes joins Britain, Australia, New Zealand and others in condemning the barbarity of whaling—brings Norwegians over to Alaska to help improve Inuit techniques.

Alleging that whaling is inherently cruel, as the British do, often comes with the further claim that whales are somehow “special”: they are extraordinarily intelligent, perhaps, or spiritual, noble or peaceful, or they have some mixture of these qualities that makes killing them more reprehensible than, say, killing cows or pigs. Science has little to say about this sort of speculation. Whales look peaceful enough, though bull whales of some species bear the scars of fierce fighting with other males. Contrary to popular belief, only humpbacks “sing”, and not much is known about their purpose in doing so.

Are whales spiritual? If you like. Only remember also that, 150 years ago when “civilised” Britain and the United States competed fiercely for dominance of the whale-oil industry, polite society had a somewhat different notion of the noble giants of the sea. Then, they were brutal and heathenish. A notebook belonging to Thomas Nickerson, the cabin boy of the Essex, a Nantucket whaling ship, preserves a gripping account of how a “monster” of an enraged sperm whale sunk his ship in 1820. The sailors subsequently had to start eating each other to survive, a twist that no doubt would have tickled the whales.

As a final gibe, anti-whalers accuse whaling countries of cowardly deception, by conducting their whaling under the cover of “scientific research”. Only Norway calls its whaling commercial. (This is not illegal, because Norway reserved its position on the IWC's 1986 moratorium.) Iceland and Japan say they want to research whale diets to manage fish stocks more effectively. Iceland guesses that its minke whales eat about 2m tonnes of marine “biomass” a year—a bit more than its fishermen catch—and wants to know how much of that is, for instance, cod.

Anti-whalers say this is a flimsy cover for commercial fishing interests, buttressing the Greenpeace line about the imminent return of large-scale commercial whaling. Yet neither Japanese nor Icelandic whaling can really be described as “commercial”, at least if that term embodies any concept of profits. The governments of both Japan and Iceland do recoup some of the costs of their research by selling the meat of the whales they kill—but this, they argue, they are required to do by the IWC, which stipulates that creatures killed for scientific purposes should be “processed”.

It is possible, however, that the desire of both Iceland and Japan to resume commercial whaling fills their governments with greater enthusiasm for these controversial research programmes than they might otherwise possess. Australian scientists have pioneered new methods of researching whales' diets that involve the analysis of their faeces and do not depend on killing them first. Iceland says these methods are not proven, but no doubt it also believes that its lethal research programmes help to keep alive the possibility that commercial whaling may one day be resumed. Were they to stop, the anti-whalers would be able to claim a victory that might help pave the way for the outright banning of all whale-hunting.

If the whalers are needlessly obdurate, their opponents can be just as needlessly hypocritical. Their mixture of propaganda, insults, distorted scientific half-truths and lies tends to stir up nationalist sentiment among the pro-whaling countries, who consider themselves victims of sanctimonious foreigners practising cultural and culinary imperialism. Not one member of the Norwegian parliament opposes his government's policy, says Norway's Mr Johansen. The public is solidly behind the government, say Icelandic officials. In Japan, where public opinion matters rather less in politics than some foreigners suppose, nationalist politicians also put up a robust defence.

Britain opposes whaling, explains Mr Cowan, “because that is what the public expects us to do.” But opinion surveys suggest that most Britons (as well as Australians, Americans and others opposed to whaling) believe wrongly that all whales are endangered, which happens to be the impression given by both Greenpeace and the British government. Research by the Japanese government leads it to believe that most Australians think there is only one species of whale—“the whale”—and that it is endangered. An effort paid for by the Japanese government to stuff leaflets through Aussie letterboxes appears not to be doing the trick.

How might this bizarre war of attrition come to an end? For a start, those opposed to whaling could look themselves in the eye and ask why a multinational organisation, reflecting the views of just one group, should claim for itself the right to deny other countries the freedom to kill their own animals, which are in plentiful supply, as they see fit? Should those who disapprove of the killing of animals according to kosher or halal practice set the universal slaughtering standards for Jews and Muslims? Should Hindus be allowed to impose their views about cow-killing on the world's hamburger-eaters? Should militant vegetarians have the right to forbid anyone anywhere to kill an animal?

In fact, less moralising from the anti-whalers might even serve their purpose better, if that purpose is indeed to save whales from the harpoon. The economics of whaling is unlikely ever to attract much hunting, and certainly nothing on a large scale. It is the politics that excites: politicians champion whaling in Japan, Iceland and Norway because it is popular to stand up to foreign bullying. Perhaps, too, if there were less bullying, Iceland and Japan might feel less compelled to lavish taxpayers' money on such elaborate and ambitious whale-killing research programmes. Were it not for the politics, Japan and Iceland might even be up to their elbows in whale faeces already.

They might also admit that hunting can lead to the extinction of species, sometimes even within a very short time. The passenger pigeon, for instance, was once probably the most numerous bird in the world, with a population in the 19th century in the billions. But by the early 1900s it was extinct. Though farming and other pressures on its habitat—mixed hardwood forests—would have made it hard for the species to survive in competition with modern man, the coup de grâce had been delivered by hunting. It is not fanciful to argue that that might have already happened to some species of whale had their killing not been banned. Recent research, recorded in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that the slaughter of over half a million whales in the north Pacific between 1946 and 1979 caused such a fall in their numbers that the killer whales that used to prey on them turned their attention to other creatures, such as seals, sea lions and otters, whose numbers have yet to recover. Whale stocks have recovered a bit, but stand at only about 14% of their former levels.

Whatever the facts, however, the politicians and lobbyists are not going to stop scrapping. They are having far too much fun scoring cheap points for their “environmentalism” or the defence of their country's honour, or rattling the Greenpeace collection tin. Yet with fewer anti-whalers, there might in time be fewer whalers, too, as the politics, lacking proper cause, faded to nothing.