Outfoxing Limits on Whaling

Here on the frigid shore of the Bering Sea, human endeavor has brought together two animals--the fox and the whale--in a way that nature never contemplated.

On the beach, the bones and blubber of 39 California gray whales lie slowly decaying where the 35-ton animals were butchered. Waves wash over a whale’s severed head and backbone, dragging its giant intestines back to sea.

On a bluff overlooking this scene of carnage, 5,000 young polar foxes live out their brief lives in small cages, where they feed on the whale meat and await their turn to be slaughtered.

In a bizarre melding of Soviet and native cultures, this has been the cycle of life for more than three decades in this remote village of Chukchis, Eskimos and Russians 75 miles from the Arctic Circle.

The village’s 40 Chukchi hunters--all employees of the Lorino fox farm--harvest the gray whale under International Whaling Commission regulations that permit indigenous people who historically hunted whales to kill a limited number for their own “subsistence.”

But as Russia and the United States seek permission to expand aboriginal whaling in their northern territories, the annual Lorino hunt calls into question what practices are allowed under the commission’s rules.

Whaling conducted since the 1960s in the name of Russia’s indigenous people has produced thousands of tons of whale meat to feed captive foxes being raised for their fur, experts say. Today, Lorino’s inhabitants can take a share of each whale killed, but the villagers say most of the cetaceans’ flesh goes to feed the foxes. Mayor Vladimir Shashkin estimates the caged carnivores ate the equivalent of 50 gray whales last year.

“The best pieces of meat go to the people,” Shashkin said, “and the rest goes to the fox farm.”

Even with its free whale meat, Lorino’s fur business is highly unprofitable. The brainchild of Soviet planners, the enterprise loses twice as much money as it makes but survives in large part through the success of Lorino’s hunters in harvesting gray whales.

The operation seems to rely more on Soviet methods than aboriginal tradition: Chukchi hunters pursue their prey in motorboats and kill each whale by shooting it as many as 500 times with .30-caliber army carbines.

Rather than eat the blubber--as is customary for many indigenous people--the villagers melt most of it into oil to sell for use in manufacturing. At the moment, Shashkin said, the village is seeking a buyer for 30 tons of oil produced over the last three years.

The whale hunt is intended to help indigenous people, but natives and newcomers alike carry home whatever they can carve from the carcasses butchered on the beach. On special occasions, villagers said, the hunters kill whales barely a year old because they taste better.

“It’s free meat. We eat it,” said federal border guard Lt. Andrei Chekurov, a Russian stationed in Lorino. “It’s just like beef. The foxes get a bigger share than the people, but the people are welcome to take as much as they want.”

A Paragon of Efficient Whaling

Lorino, a rundown Soviet-style settlement of mud streets, grim concrete apartments and aging wooden barracks, has become the center of modern Russian whaling. The most efficient whale-hunting village on its side of the Bering Strait, Lorino takes more than four-fifths of all the whales killed by Russia. The skill of its hunters and the abundance of whales in the Bering Sea have helped the village of 1,464 people survive even as the economy of the Far North collapses.

Hugging the wind-swept Chukotka coast 80 miles from Alaska, Lorino has few visitors, and the nature of its whaling operation has remained largely unknown to the outside world. During the Cold War, the peninsula was a closed region because of its proximity to the United States. Even now, the government strictly controls access by outsiders, who must obtain special permits and register with authorities in every village they enter.

In an era when indigenous people around the globe are trying to recover lost traditions--and environmentalists are working to save the whale--the issue of whaling by native groups is a sensitive one. The International Whaling Commission imposed a moratorium on commercial whaling in 1986, but it has permitted whale hunting by aboriginal people if the meat is important to their diet and the hunt is central to their culture.

In granting Russia’s Eskimos and Chukchis permission to kill gray whales, the multinational agency said the hunt could be conducted “only when the meat and products of such whales are to be used exclusively for local consumption by the aborigines.” One exception under the commission’s rules allows native people to “trade in items that are byproducts of subsistence catches.”

Scientists said the commission has long been aware of Russia’s practice of feeding whale meat to foxes but has taken no action. The environmental group Greenpeace once lodged a protest, but Russia--a commission member--denied any wrongdoing and said foxes were fed only whale “byproducts.” The commission, which has no power to conduct independent investigations, dropped the matter.

Commission secretary Ray Gambell, a whale biologist, declined to comment on whether Lorino’s practices of feeding foxes whale meat and selling whale oil comply with the commission’s rules. “We would have to have presented to us the evidence of the use before we could make a determination,” he said.

Today, the world’s indigenous hunters are permitted to kill almost as many whales as each of the two renegade whaling nations: Norway, which takes 460 minke whales a year, and Japan, which harvests 500 minkes a year in the name of science and sells the meat commercially as a “byproduct” of its research. By comparison, indigenous hunters in Russia, Alaska, Canada, Greenland and the Caribbean are allowed to kill more than 400 whales a year.

Once hunted to the verge of extinction, the California gray is now protected along most of its route as it migrates 6,000 miles along the coast from the lagoons of Baja California to the Bering Sea. Its population has recovered to an estimated 23,000, and in 1994 it was removed from the U.S. endangered species list.

The endangered bowhead, which ranges from the Arctic Ocean to the Bering Sea, is the historic prey of the region’s people and, to them, more desirable than the gray. Its blubber is tastier, they say, and a bowhead can weigh 100 tons--three times as much as a gray. Moreover, the gray--once called the “devil fish” by whalers--is more likely to put up a fight when attacked and, once killed, doesn’t float.

On the Alaskan side of the Bering Strait, the Eskimos are allowed to kill 65 bowheads annually. On the Russian side, the native people are permitted to take 140 grays--but no bowheads.

Eskimos in Alaska and Russia--some of whom are related despite the Cold War years of separation--have begun a joint effort to expand the bowhead hunt, setting up observation posts to count the animals and prove that the endangered whale has recovered enough to sustain a larger yield. In the interest of promoting a more humane hunt, the Alaska Eskimos are scheduled this month to give their Russian cousins a gift of 20 whaling guns with ammunition designed to explode inside a whale’s body.

Next month, Russia will ask the International Whaling Commission to let its native hunters begin killing five bowheads a year, while the U.S. will seek approval for the Makah Indians of coastal Washington to take five grays a year, reviving a tradition dormant for 70 years.

For centuries, the Chukotka Peninsula has been populated by Eskimos, who lived in villages along the shore, and by Chukchis, nomadic people who raised reindeer inland on the tundra and established coastal settlements. Both groups engaged in the dangerous occupation of hunting whales from small boats using hand-thrown harpoons.

A Soviet Strategy to Create Jobs

After World War II, the Soviet Union established greater control over the border region by shutting down many traditional Eskimo and Chukchi villages and moving the residents to a handful of larger, integrated settlements.

To create jobs for the local people, the Communists set up more than a dozen fox farms along the Chukotka coast, all built in the same Soviet style. On platforms 20 feet off the ground, the screeching pups were kept in wire mesh cages about a cubic yard in size.

The government ordered that most whale meat--as well as walruses and seals long part of the native diet--be fed to the foxes. Rather than let the Eskimos and Chukchis hunt the whales in traditional fashion, the Soviets took over the business of “aboriginal” whaling, bringing in a ship with a harpoon gun to fulfill the quota and deliver dead whales to the fox farms.

After the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, the whaling ship stopped coming and the local people began organizing their own hunts. Russia reported to the International Whaling Commission that its native hunters killed 172 whales between 1994 and 1996, including 144 killed by Lorino’s hunters. Mayor Shashkin put the number higher, saying the village killed 120 grays last year alone.

Among the remains on the beach are the heads of two young whales--one of them apparently not much more than a year old. Shashkin said the smaller head belonged to a yearling killed for Lorino’s annual celebration of the whale in mid-August.

“Would you prefer an old cow or a young calf with younger meat?” asked the mayor, a Russian who immigrated to the region 30 years ago. “We want some tender meat. All the meat from that one went to the people, not to the foxes.”

While the natives usually eat whale meat in traditional fashion after hanging it out to dry, the Russians are more likely to fry it like pork chops. The border guards--often short of provisions in their remote outpost--like to make pelmeni, a traditional Russian pasta, stuffed with ground whale.

“It’s not only indigenous people; everyone eats the whale,” hunter Grigory Owtoy said. “It’s tasty.”

“But mostly it goes to the fox farm,” said Dima Tynelin, a 23-year-old harpooner.

During Soviet times, the village did quite well selling whale blubber--melted and preserved in drums--for use in cosmetics and as a lubricant. The whaling operation produced enough income to pay salaries for three months a year. But the trade has faltered since Soviet days, when there were guaranteed markets and government subsidies for costs--for example, to transport goods.

Now, because the village cannot sell its stockpile of oil, this year’s blubber lies on the beach. It covers an area about half the size of a football field, slowly decaying as the oil seeps into the sand. Occasionally, villagers and dogs come by to take a hunk of the fat for food, but Shashkin said he feared most of it will go unused this year.

“This is wasted money under your feet,” he said, surveying the mass of blubber. “We already have barrels of the fat and no market.”

Of the chain of fox farms that once dotted the coast, most have shut down. The international fur market is shrinking, and, without Soviet subsidies, the high cost of transporting pelts from the region is prohibitive.

A Fox Farm in Financial Peril

In the village of Novoye Chaplino, 80 miles south of Lorino, half the fox farm is a crumbling ruin, with one platform collapsed to the ground. In the section still standing, 1,200 foxes are held in long rows of cages separated by narrow aisles. The wooden walkways are covered with fox excrement, and the high-pitched yelps of the fox pups pierce the air.

Without a supply of whale meat, the Novoye Chaplino enterprise is in dire financial straits, losing three times what it can make from selling its pelts. Employees, who have not been paid for up to two years, predict that this will be the farm’s last season.

“This year we will slaughter all of them,” said worker Svetlana Selakina, holding up a pair of 4-month-old foxes. “It’s not profitable for us to sell them. I’m sick and tired because I haven’t been paid at all. It’s hard work, and it’s very smelly.”

Even so, Selakina--half Eskimo and half Ukrainian--defended raising foxes for their fur. Although the pelts are meant for export, she said, fur is essential in the Far North, where temperatures can plunge beneath 50 below.

“I don’t know why Brigitte Bardot is raising such a hue and cry until no one wears fur,” she said as a fox’s claw scratched her hand, drawing blood. “She lives in Paris and we live here. We need our traditional furs.”

The Lorino farm has always been the largest on the peninsula. Once it had 20,000 foxes, but it has shrunk to a fourth of its previous size.

The village is still run much like a Soviet collective farm, and the fur operation is subsidized by the more successful reindeer farm on the tundra. The village purchases fodder for the foxes, but the soaring cost of shipping goods has made the business even more dependent on sea mammals. As at Novoye Chaplino, the hunters supplement the foxes’ diet with walruses and seals.

Lorino’s fox pups will be slaughtered in mid-November, when they are about 7 months old and the cold weather has thickened their fur. Although the enterprise has little hope of making money in today’s economy, Shashkin said it must keep operating because it employs 120 people--nearly a tenth of the village’s population.

“This big farm is unprofitable,” the mayor said. “But to close the farm is impossible. What is to be done with the people who are working there?”