Whaling

As any reader of this blog will have surmised, I like whales and dolphins. I find them to be very interesting creatures, and I would dearly love to see a whale in the flesh when diving (seen dolphins already, in the Red Sea). I like them so much, and they are so rare and endangered, that I've decided that I won't eat whale meat, just as I'm not eating shark's fin. There may be what seems like many whales in the sea today, but whales have long generation times, and it will be decades before we see what 200 years of large-scale whaling have wreaked.

People still do kill whales. Certain cultures (Inuit, some Native American tribes, some Polynesian tribes) are allowed to take a few dozen whales each year as part of their cultural practices. For what it's worth I think that this is wrong - while it's true that tribes should be allowed to manage their own natural resources as they see fit, I don't understand how that argument can stack up for creatures that range the oceans globally. Whales belong to the world, and no one should be able to exploit them by right of prior claim.

So to find that a rich country can still whale, and on a large scale, for food and for "cultural" reasons, is extremely repugnant. There are 3 main culprits - Japan, Iceland and Norway. Japan is by far the worst offender. Japanese whalers have been issued permits by the International Whaling Commission for 10,477 whales since 1986, some 92% of the total. The Japanese claim that it's for research, but there's only so many whales you need to kill for research. The other reason - for census purposes - is even more stupid (counting animals by killing them is farcical). No, whaling is for whale meat, for consumption purposes, pure and simple. Adjacent image shows a Japanese whaling ship (Nisshin Maru) taking 2 minke whales off Antarctica (ABC News Australia).

The adjacent image shows Japan's issued permits over the years. There's a clear upward trend, with most of the catch being minke whales. Why Japan needed to take more than 1,000 minke in 2005 is unclear. It also seems that the 2006 catch was supposed to be even bigger, but fires on a Japanese whaling ship curtailed the whaling season. Recently, Japan has also started to take sei and sperm whales.

According to david-in-tokyo, Japan's whale meat stockpile was 3,900 tonnes in 2006, about a year's catch. This is equivalent to 1,100 minke, assuming each minke whale yields 3.6 tonnes of meat (other species of whale probably yield a bit more). The whale meat auction programme released 1,900 tonnes from the 2006 catch in 2007, pricing minke meat at 1,990 yen per kilo. That's 20 pounds sterling, a bit more than twice as expensive as beef in the UK. I believe it's actually cheaper than Gressingham duck. The Japanese government is prohibited from dumping the meat at below cost price, but it's still hardly expensive. Does the whaling industry cover it's cost of capital? Probably not, although the Japanese government is prohibited from selling the meat below cost price. This is state support - anathema to me, but then they do things differently in Japan.

Whale meat is sold not only in restaurants, but as hamburger (there's even a specialist fast food chain), in school meals, and, in one infamous case, as dog food. Consumption is rising, as this post from David shows. It's a little sad. There must be input substitutes for these products. Even at these low prices, the Japanese government appears to have to support prices at a suitable level by limiting supply - the stockpile keeps growing (4,400 tons in April 2007) and the number of whales being taken keeps increasing. According to David, there is increasing demand, but I suspect that if all the stockpile was released into the market, prices would fall, and it would be clear that Japan need not take several hundred whales a year.

As with sharks, don't eat whales or dolphins. For one thing, they may be far more intelligent than we give them credit for. If one supports the Great Ape Project, and I do, there may be a case for extending the idea and ethical basis behind it to certain cetaceans.