A Whale of an Agenda

Some people like their whales dead, for the tons of meat and oil that they yield. Others like them alive. Those two views crashed head-on last month at the annual meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC), which entertained a Japanese proposal to pave the way toward legalizing commercial whaling, suspended since 1986. The commission has voted repeatedly against resuming whaling, and most of its longtime members showed no inclination to change that position. But Japan attempted to play a new card this year, inducing poor, nonwhaling countries (like Guinea and Gabon) to join the IWC and to vote for the proposal in return for Japanese foreign aid.

The outcome was a political disaster for Japan, which not only lost the vote but so outraged even its allies that some of them withdrew their support. Still, no one expects this latest battle to settle the long-running whale wars. The commission plans to meet again in October to set out terms by which any future commercial whaling would be carried out. In November, the Japanese will try to convince the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species that minke whales are now so abundant as to deserve less protection. While these passionate debates are in the first instance about whales, they also involve broader questions of how best to manage internationally valuable biological resources, and how Japan as a densely populated island nation will feed itself. All sides in the dispute have their own agendas.

The arguments against whaling are of two types: ethical and economic.

Most of us take a middle ground on treatment of animals: We object more to killing dogs and chimps, say, than to killing bacteria and worms. We justify such distinctions because of the animals’ different capacities for social relationships, intelligence and feeling pain. Whales (along with primates) are closest to humans in these respects, and so arouse strong feelings.

Those who support a ban also make an economic argument based on whales’ position at the top of the ocean food chain. Both on land and in the sea, the functioning of ecosystems depends disproportionately on their top species: Knock out those controlling players and you’re likely to mess up the whole ecosystem. Paradoxically, reducing whale numbers may end up reducing numbers of those fish species that humans eat, as some whales may especially eat predatory fish preying on fish eaten by humans. For a long time, Japan denied that whaling would reduce whale numbers. Recently, Japanese defenders of whaling have done an about-face: They now accept that charge wholeheartedly, so much so that they propose to resume whaling in order to reduce whale numbers, because whales are (it is claimed) voracious fish-eaters competing with humans and responsible for recent worldwide declines in catches of most ocean fish.

The answer to that argument is a no-brainer. Most whale species don’t compete for food with fish-loving humans, because they instead eat tiny plankton, deep-ocean squid and small fish. The most common remaining large whale species, the minke whale, consumes mainly krill (tiny shrimp), plus minor amounts of two species of small fish (sandeel and capelin) scorned for human consumption. It is disingenuous to argue that minke whales are taking food off Japanese tables.

Whales and fish have coexisted for 50 million years, but many whale populations have declined by more than 90% in the last 200 years because of whaling, so fish numbers should have soared by Japanese reasoning. In fact, most ocean fisheries have been crashing recently for an obvious reason: the huge and rising populations of ocean-going fishing boats, not the vestigial populations of ocean-going whales. Whales are now eating fewer fish, and humans are eating more fish, than at any previous time in history.

When the IWC banned commercial whaling, Japan announced that it too would give up commercial whaling. Within a year, however, it declared that it would instead carry out something different, called “scientific whaling,” in which whales are supposedly killed to gain information about their diet and population structure. Of course the whales thereby killed (this year’s target is 700) are still sold for food, just as were commercially hunted whales.

Fifteen years of scientific whaling have resulted in only a handful of papers published in scientific journals to report any research results. That has led many scientists to conclude that Japanese whalers are not killing whales to do research but are doing research as an excuse to kill whales.

Nonlethal methods yield much more information about the questions addressed by this so-called scientific whaling. Examining whale feces gives reliable samples of whale diets, while biopsies tell us a whale’s average diet over its lifetime. In contrast, a dead whale’s stomach contents represent only the last meal the whale ate before it was killed.

We already know plenty about what whales eat from the stomachs of hundreds of thousands of whales killed in the course of commercial whaling before the IWC ban. For instance, a 1977 report on the stomach contents of 53,207 sei whales killed by Japanese whalers yielded a clear picture: Only 2% of those whales had been eating fish, while more than 82% had consumed small shrimp. That conclusion could not possibly be overturned by new knowledge gained from Japan’s planned killing this year of 50 more of this species, which is at high risk of extinction.

Why, then, is Japan so desperate to resume commercial whaling?

One claim the Japanese make is tradition, citing the few coastal villages with a long history of whaling and the supposed strong support of the Japanese public for that tradition. But many human societies have had (or still have) traditions of enslaving or mutilating other humans, and torturing or mutilating animals for sport. Those practices don’t deserve respect merely because they are traditional.

In fact, there is no groundswell of pro-whaling sentiment in Japan; most Japanese simply don’t care. Instead, in Japan as in many other countries, the groundswell of public sentiment related to whales involves whale-watching, a tourist industry that attracted more than 100,000 Japanese last year.

Another reason cited for resuming whaling is its economic importance in Japan. Actually, the entire Japanese whale-killing industry has just a few hundred employees and negligible economic clout.

The Japanese also insist that whales are an important food supply. But whales make a negligible contribution to Japanese seafood consumption. Eating most whale meat is unhealthful. Being at the top of the food chain, whales accumulate mercury and other toxins that disrupt reproduction of whales (and of humans). At best, some prized whale species provide a luxury meat sold at $100 per pound--unaffordable to most Japanese--and is consumed in small quantities, while nonprized species are used for fertilizer and animal food.

If Japanese whaling makes no economic sense and is not supported by public opinion, then why is Japan’s government (or actually, its Fisheries Agency) so passionate about it?

Japan is a densely populated, rich nation that doesn’t produce enough food for its own needs and that depends on imports, especially of fish. Although whale consumption itself is insignificant, Japan tenaciously opposes any proposal for international management of biological resources (even elephant ivory and turtle shell), for fear of starting down a slippery slope that could lead to restrictions on access to the world’s fish.

But that merely illustrates a tragic irony: Japanese opposition to sensible international management of biological resources will ultimately prove more disastrous to import-dependent Japan than to any other country. Around the world, marine resources--whether whales, cod, California sardines or anything else--have been hunted to near-extinction in the same way. The most vocal opponents of management are typically fishermen themselves, with the result that the numbers of fish and subsequently the fishermen decline catastrophically. Now that foolish error is being repeated by the Japanese, who are endangering their own seafood supplies by overfishing.

A final irony is that official Japanese support for whaling is dreadful for Japan’s world image. The Japanese are sensitive about how others view them, but Japan’s holdout support for whaling (as well as its rapacity in international fishing and logging) helps fuel the worst possible image. For us non-Japanese who have Japanese friends and relatives, and who see so much to admire in that remarkable nation, it is sad to see Japan’s image dragged into the mud by hypocrisy.

That bad image appears to be precipitating a whaling policy reappraisal within Japan, marked by growing disagreement between the pro-whaling Fisheries Agency (which is narrowly focused on this year’s seafood imports) and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (which has broader concerns about Japan’s long-term interests).

For the sake of the vast majority of Japanese people themselves, as well as for the whales, the rest of us should do our best to block Japan’s self-destructive rush toward resumption of commercial whaling.