Harpoons in Vogue Today Are Explosive

Whalers say explosive harpoons make excellent hunting weapons because they tear through the prey’s flesh and the barbs keep the wounded animals from pulling free.

Opponents of whaling, for the same reasons, call them horrible weapons.

The small cannons mounted in the whaling ships’ bows will be armed with 5-foot harpoons that have red explosive tips called penthrite grenades.

“We try to fire at short range,” said Jan Odin Olavsen, a 45-year-old fisherman and whale hunter. “The grenade explodes about 20 to 30 centimeters (8 to 12 inches) into the whale’s body. The harpoon, about 95% of the time, goes right through the whale.”

In the Norwegian commercial hunts of 1984-86, roughly half of the minke whales died instantly. Some others lived nearly an hour, sometimes unconscious.

“We begin to winch in the whale at once,” Olavsen said. “If we don’t think it’s dead, we use a rifle to shoot it in the head.”

The advantage of the harpoon is that it has a line attached and claws at the end that keep the whale from swimming away, said Lars Walloe, a physiologist and whaling expert at the University of Oslo. By contrast, a wounded elk might flee and die after days in agony, he said.

Kare Elgmork, a zoology professor at the same school, countered: “Imagine firing a harpoon through an elk and dragging it behind a car for an hour. That’s the kind of agony a whale suffers.”

Olavsen, the whaler, had a simpler view: “There is no mercy in the arctic.”