Dot Earth Blog: Should Fin Whales Be a Source of Wonder or Meat?

Photo A fin whale surfaces near a Canadian whale-watching boat in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.Credit Andrew C. Revkin

Here are two very different views of humans' relationship with the world's second biggest animal, the fin whale. Above is a special moment during a whale-watching excursion in Canadian waters (which I wrote about here). Below is an image of one of more than 100 fin whales slaughtered this year by a business in Iceland that, according to a new report by conservationists, is exporting most of the meat to Japan.

Should fin whales be a source of wonder or meat? I vote for wonder.

Here's the latest:

Iceland has long had an on-again, off-again relationship with the international treaty governing commercial whaling. After a moratorium was enacted in 1986, Iceland withdrew. In 2002, the country rejoined but with a reservation that it claimed provided wiggle room permitting it to kill whales. Read this International Whaling Commission document on Iceland's actions for a neutral view of the details.

Timed with the latest meeting of the commission, in Slovenia, the nonprofit Environmental Investigation Agency has issued "Slayed in Iceland," a fresh critique of Iceland's whaling operation, which is all done by one business, Hvalur, with strong financial and operational ties to HB Grandi, a large Icelandic international seafood company. That relationship has prompted a coalition of conservation groups to create a consumer campaign to boycott that company's seafood products. The campaign website, Don't Buy from Icelandic Whalers, describes how the seafood company's facilities are used to process the whale meat:

Fin whale meat is transported by truck from the Hvalur whaling station to Akranes, where it is cut, packaged, boxed, and made ready for export in HB Grandi facilities.

Hvalur exported whale products to Japan via Canada in January 2014, and a massive shipment of 2,000 tons of whale products left Iceland on March 20, 2014, destined for Japan.

A lead author of the new report on Iceland's whaling business, Clare Perry, has an essay in The Ecologist making these main points:

Since 2006, the Icelandic whaling company Hvalur hf has killed more than 500 fin whales, purely to exploit a limited demand for whale meat and blubber in Japan.

Over the past eight years, Hvalur has exported more than 5,000 tonnes of fin whale products from Iceland to Japan, including a record single shipment of 2,071 tonnes in 2014.

These exports are worth an estimated US$50 million and Iceland's escalating whale hunts are clear and wilful abuses of the IWC's moratorium as well as the ban on international commercial trade in whale products imposed by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES).

Iceland claims its whaling is sustainable when the best available scientific evidence reveals that its fin whale quota is more than three times greater than the level considered sustainable….

It is time for the Contracting Governments to the IWC and non-member governments worldwide to take strong diplomatic and economic action to bring an end to what is clearly the most flagrant abuse of the moratorium on commercial whaling since its inception.

Without such action, Iceland's commercial whaling and its exports of the products of endangered fin whales to Japan will continue, and Hvalur's domination of the Japanese market will grow.

Other groups, including Whale and Dolphin Conservation and the Animal Welfare Institute, are pressing other countries to crack down on Iceland.

As I laid out in my 2004 news article, arguments about abundance have less and less strength as whale numbers, including populations of fin whales, recover from a century or more of industrial-scale hunting.

The prime issue, to my eye, is ethical. (This is on top of the legal arguments about whether Iceland can have it both ways under the treaty.)

Unless you're a vegan (I'm not), killing animals is an inevitable part of human affairs. But firing harpoons into intelligent, social marine mammals in the wild from a moving vessel is not the same as raising bison on rangeland and slaughtering them in controlled conditions.

Even in countries with long maritime and whaling traditions, we can do better.

Here's a video report on Iceland's whaling operation from the Environmental Investigation Agency: