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Water en land

Mens en Milieu

Hunting   Whale hunting   
Whaler in conflict with Sea Shepard activists, Photo via http://media-antarctica.seashepherd2.org

Whale hunting

There has been an international ban for hunting all whale species since 1986. Norway and Japan did not agree and still continue to hunt whales, which are then sold for consumption. The species in the North Sea still being hunted is the minke whale. Iceland began hunting whales commercially in 2006.

  • History
    Catches of minke whales, Ecomare

    Whale hunting has been banned since 1986 in order to prevent their extinction. This ban made an exception for indigenous folk, such as Inuit in Greenland and Canada. There is also a clause which allows hunting for scientific study. Despite this ban, Japan, Norway and Iceland have continued to hunt, minke whales in particular, under the guise of scientific research.
    All North Sea folk have been involved in the past in whale hunting for either a shorter or longer period of time. In those days, the whale oil was important, which was boiled out of the layer of fat. In order to find the whales, one sailed to the northern Arctic Sea or further. During the eighteenth century, hunting the slower whale species in the north was so intense that these species became too rare and was no longer profitable.
    The harpoon canon was founded in the 20th century, which made hunting of the faster fin whales possible. Since then, more than a million blue and fin whales have been reduced into oil and steaks. A new Dutch whaler, the 'Willem Barentsz' was launched in 1950. Fin whales in particular were caught in the south pole region. However, just after several years, the catch was no longer profitable: even in the Antarctic Seas, the number of animals had visibly declined.
    Whale hunting was found controversial in the 1970s. The International Whaling Commission (IWC) put an end to commercial whale hunting in 1985. At the end of 1994 in Mexico, the IWC decided to designate a reserve for all whale species near Antarctica. It concerned a permanent and absolute hunting ban for all seas south of 40 degrees latitude. The border is only lower near South America, namely by 60 degrees south.
    Whales had never been hunted in the North Sea on a large scale for the simple reason that there were not many large whales here. Porpoises were hunted in Denmark. They would use boats to drive the animals to a sea strait, where they could catch and kill them more readily.

  • Hunting minke whales

    Norway has killed between two hundred and six hundred minke whales for commercial purposes in the past years (see graph). Dozens to hundreds of them were killed in the North Sea. The Norwegian whale hunters say that there are enough minkes swimming in Norwegian waters to permit killing them. According to the Norwegian embassy, around 112,000 minkes live in the seas between Iceland, Scotland and Norway. However, Norwegian scientists do not agree. It is not known how many of this species there are, but they say there could not be more than 53,000. Oslo maintained the numbers at 87,600 up to 1994. Based upon this figure, the IWC gave permission for Norway to kill around 300 minkes per year.
    The fact that Norway maintains faulty figures was admitted in 1995 during a closed meeting of the IWC in Oslo. The computer program which was used to calculate the numbers appeared to contain major mistakes. The news had been carefully kept secret by the Norwegian government for a long time.
    Another argument used by the Norwegians for hunting whales is that they hunt just the same as the Inuit and Chuckchi from a traditional point of view and for the need of meat. In 1999, the English newspaper The Independent published photos of a Norwegian cooling cell where whale blubber was being stored. The photo was made in secret by a member of Greenpeace. There was at least 500 tons of whale blubber being stored in the Norwegian cooling cells. Because Norwegians do not eat blubber, both Norway and Japan pleaded for a revision of the trading restrictions of whale meat. Whale blubber is considered a delicacy in Japan and therefore very valuable there.
    Japanese scientists have calculated that whales eat more than three times the amount of seafood than what the fisheries catch themselves. Norwegian and Japanese whale hunters like to use this fact as a new argument for hunting the whales. What the scientists forget to mention is that the main food for whales (krill and octopus from the deep sea) are commercially uninteresting.
    The Norwegians made a quotum of 1052 minke whales for 2008. A total of 533 were caught.