WASHINGTON, D.C.—A coalition of 20 environmental and animal welfare organizations urged the Bush Administration today at a news conference to take a leadership role to stop commercial whaling and protect whales from extinction. Despite a moratorium on commercial whaling since 1986, Norway, Iceland and Japan flout it, says "Whales Need US," the name of the coalition ("Coalition," for short). Since the moratorium, more than 20,000 whales have been killed for what the Coalition says are commercial purposes.
The Coalition further charges that the U.S. has become progressively weaker on whaling issues and that President Bush does not take seriously the plight of the world's whales. The coalition wants the U.S. government to lead other countries in using trade sanctions to persuade the violators of the moratorium to stop killing whales.
Gavin Carter, an advisor to the Japanese whaling industry, contacted The Epoch Times to defend Japan's desire to resume commercial whaling. Carter said many species of the whale populations are now sufficiently robust that the commercial whaling is sustainable in certain oceanic areas. Further, Carter says the Japanese are being responsible by supporting a management system of commercial quotas. He said the coalition's statements regarding the threat of extinction of certain species of whales is highly misleading.
Congressional and Public Support for the Moratorium
The coalition includes the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), the nation's largest and most powerful animal protection organization. Other members of the coalition include the Animal Welfare Institute (AWI), Defenders of Wildlife, Greenpeace, Sierra Club, and World Wildlife Fund. They want the U.S. to fight harder for whale conservation and against the killing of whales for profit at the upcoming International Whaling Commission (IWC) to be held from May 28-31 in Anchorage, Alaska.
The unique coalition received bipartisan support from 56 members of Congress. Their cause was also bolstered by American public opinion in which 78 percent of registered voters oppose commercial whaling, according to a March poll, conducted by Market Strategies and commissioned by a coalition member, International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW). However, the public is highly supportive—68%, support vs. 26 percent, oppose—of limited whale hunting by native tribes in Alaska for subsistence use.
The statistics of public support for the ban on commercial whaling may be somewhat overstated, however. The wording of the questions and the background information required before asking the questions are not neutral, says Carter.
Showdown with Japan in May
Despite a 20-year moratorium that bans commercial whaling, some IWC nations—Japan, Norway, and Iceland—continued "whaling," by exploiting loopholes in the whaling convention, says the Coalition. Japan says the killing of whales is being done for "scientific research," which the animal protection organizations say is no more than a disguise to sell whale meat to the Japanese population. Whale meat ends up being sold in Japanese supermarkets and restaurants, including meat from endangered whale species, they say.
Oftentimes, coalition members refer to the "so-called research" of the Japanese. The reader can decide for himself/herself how scientific the Japanese whale research program by visiting: http://www.icrwhale.org/eng/SC57O1.pdf.
The Coalition adds that it is not necessary today to kill whales for scientific research. Marine biologists now have non-lethal ways to study whales.
For the upcoming IWC meeting, Japan, joined by Norway and Iceland, is aggressively lobbying for overturning the moratorium and resuming "full-scale" commercial whaling, according to the HSUS. Last year at a special meeting of the IWC, Japan even secured the U.S. vote to resume small-scale Japanese coastal whaling. This was a first step towards lifting the moratorium and was a reversal for the U.S., which has always been the "staunchest defender of the whales," says the Animal Welfare Institute.
The U.S. and a few other nations like Russia have aboriginal populations whose whaling in the past has been made an exception to the ban on commercial whaling. The coalition believes that Japan will try to deny Alaskan Eskimo whalers their subsistence whaling quotas in order to pressure the U.S. and other nations to capitulate to Japan's coastal whaling, which is tantamount to resuming full-scale commercial whaling, they say.
The Japanese, according to Carter, only want limited, sustainable commercial whaling. Over 90% of the whales killed by their research program are the minke, the smallest of the great whales and highly abundant. It's agreed by all sides that the estimated ocean population of minke is somewhere between 400,000 and 800,000. Is Japan's catching 900 this year a threat to their sustainable population? Carter says theirs is no way it could while the Coalition hedges on this question.
Carter said that whether it is commercial "subsistence" whaling by native aboriginal populations or commercial whaling by Japanese fisherman, it's just a different label for the same thing. To argue for the former and deny coastal quotas for the latter is promoting "a double standard," he says.
A different argument made by the Coalition is that killing whales is inherently cruel. Even if whale populations are sufficiently robust that the stocks would not be endangered by controlled whaling, the slaughtered whales suffer painful deaths, says the Coalition.
"Modern whaling involves the use of exploding harpoons fired into large, moving targets from moving platforms on a shifting sea…The probability of achieving a clean strike and thus a 'quick death' is extremely low, and the animals can suffer for hours before they die," says an AWI brochure.
Polling Data
The U.S. telephone survey on attitudes towards whaling, consisting of 1,000 registered U.S. voters, was conducted by Market Strategies, Inc., in late March. Fred Steeper, a Republican pollster, whose direction of polling programs goes back to President Nixon, spoke at the news conference about the results.
With a margin of error of ±3.1 percent for the survey's, Steeper found only 15 percent support for commercial whaling. Persons from all over the political spectrum—Liberal Democrats, Swing voters and Conservative GOP—oppose commercial whaling. The conservatives are not quite as strongly opposed as the other two categories, of whom about 82 percent oppose, but even 67 percent of the GOP conservatives opposed the killing of whales for commercial purposes.
Carter dismisses the attitudinal questions as bogus. Most people don't know the basic facts surrounding this issue, and so the pollster must give some background information before asking the specific questions. This education side of the poll given by one side of the issue is bound to be biased, says Carter.
Feeds