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Greenpeace in the UK reports that the Japanese government has diverted $30 million from its tsunami relief fund to underwrite the nation's annual whaling expedition into Antarctica (based on the false argument that whaling benefits coastal communities so badly hurt by the tsunami). Junichi Sato, from Greenpeace Japan, has denied the charge, insisting that the money is "simply used to cover the debts of the whaling program," which "has been suffering from big financial problems."
Whether or not Japan is using relief money for whaling, the fact remains that the Japanese whaling fleet has once again set sail for the Antarctica, once again to kill whales in order to turn them into meat for commercial sale, supporting an outdated cultural tradition while continuing with the old lie that Japanese whaling is in support of "scientific" research and therefore legal under the international moratorium.
Nearly half of the 13 great whale species are currently listed as endangered, some critically so, while a number of localized populations are gone or just about gone. The right whale of the North Atlantic, once common, is now down to a population of around 300 individuals and still declining. These giant animals were given their name in the old days because, as slow-moving and naturally-buoyant-after-death creatures, they were the "right" ones to find and kill. Now they are right for extinction, with their continuing decline today largely the consequence of accidental collisions with ships. The magnificent blue whales of the Antarctic, abundant until whalers discovered them, have been reduced to around 1 percent of their original numbers. At more than 100 feet long and 150 tons heavy, incidentally, these animals are the largest creatures ever to have lived on this planet, land or sea, but they, too, are teetering on the edge of non-existence. Also endangered or threatened are the gray whales of the northwestern Pacific, the fin whales, the sei, the beluga, and the sperm whales.
"Trusting creatures whose size probably precluded a knowledge of fear," writes author and marine wildlife expert Richard Ellis, in The Empty Ocean (2003), "the whales were chased until they were exhausted and then stabbed and blown up; their babies were slaughtered; their numbers were halved and halved again." The industrialized killing of whales during the twentieth century, Ellis concludes, was "perhaps the most callous demonstration history offers of humankind's self-appointed dominion over animals. One searches almost in vain for an expression of sympathy, compassion, understanding, or rationality. In their place were only insensitivity and avarice."
The International Whaling Commission (IWC) was originally organized in 1946 to support the industry by promoting the supposedly "sustainable" harvesting of whales. But commercial whaling had, by the second half of the century, reduced the numbers of most species so decisively that in July of 1982 the IWC declared a complete moratorium on all whaling.
That was an important and very positive event, but it has been challenged continuously. The Soviet whaling industry simply continued harvesting whales of all species, all ages and sizes, while falsifying their reports. The Japanese officially adhered to the terms of the moratorium by identifying their whaling as a "scientific" rather than a commerical enterprise. Iceland ignored the moratorium, allowing its ships to kill 100 minke whales and as many as 150 endangered fin whales during the 2008 and 2009 season. The Norwegians have never stopped whaling either, and they continue to slaughter hundreds of minke whales yearly, insisting that whale killing is a glorious part of their cultural heritage and, furthermore, that these giant mammals eat too many fish. During the 2009 meeting of the IWC, meanwhile, Greenland, backed by the Danish government, applied for permission to harvest as many as 50 endangered humpback whales over the next five years for the purposes of "aboriginal subsistence," even though Greenland already has a surplus of whale meat, which is sold in supermakets. . . .
Whales are magnificent creatures who inspire us with their mass and power, whose continued existence lifts our spirits, and who remind us, in ways that few other living animals can, of our own fragile impermanence. What a depressingly impoverished world we and our children and their children stand to inherit, as we continue to wipe out some of the grandest animals ever to have lived, all done in the name of commerce and pragmatism, all carried out in the pursuit of a dollars-and-cents profit.
