THE United Nations' Hague-based International Court of Justice yesterday ruled that Japan's annual Antarctic whale hunt must stop because it is not scientific.
I wonder how much trouble the Japanese did have getting their research on skinny whales published… remember the blog post back in 2008.
Japan has said it will honour the ruling.
It is my understanding that Japan labelled its current harvest in the Antarctic scientific exercise after it became illegal to hunt whales commercially. That ruling was made by the United Nation's International Whaling Commission that was originally established to oversee a more sustainable whaling industry.
If the Japanese want to continue whaling, they will perhaps have to label it 'Aboriginal subsistence whaling', because only this form of killing is currently permitted under international law. It may result in the application of less humane methods, and certainly will exclude the application of any scientific principles.
For more information on 'aboriginal subsistence whaling' there is a somewhat dated article written by me for Cosmos magazine in 2006, and of course information at the whaling thread at this blog.
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The photograph is of a Bowhead whale being harvested in northern Quebec in August 2008, via Iceclass. Unlike the Japanese who use grenade tipped harpoons in the Southern Ocean, indigenous hunters use more basic methods.
Comment from: Graeme M April 2nd, 2014 at 5:42 am
"The best outcome for the environment would be fewer people. A lot fewer."
Graeme has resurrected the population bogeyman. If this were a horror movie, the obvious title would be, "The Population Monster: The Thing That Would Not Die." Yes, population is an environmental issue, but an overrated one.
I wrote a long article about this at HubPages, and covered the topic from every angle that I could think of. However the key concept is Demographic Transition, which should be a part of Scientific Literacy 101. Without the sarcasm, it would probably be the most boring piece ever written about population. Anyway, here's a link.
http://larryfields.hubpages.com/hub/Putting-Population-into-Perspective
Reading the history of Siberia's settlement you realise just how frenetic the demand for animal skins was before improvements to natural and synthetic fibres. When Australia exported two million koala skins in one year in the 1920s, the massacre was tame compared to the Hudson Bay and Siberian hunts. That's just the pelts!
Synthetics have saved billions more animals than protests. Mines and minerals spare forests, coal and uranium mean you don't have to burn woodchips (...oh, wait). Anyway, centralised coal power means you don't have to litter the landscape with wind turbines and solar panels (...oh, wait again). Just quietly, those naughty synthetic fertilisers and sprays and all those GM seeds are the main reason humans, in such massive numbers, are no longer needing to strip every inch of ground for food. I actually seek out non-organic when shopping, though I don't make a big deal of it.
I actually do regard myself as a conservationist and the environmental movement as anti-conservation. Go figure.
Correct Stephen Williams,
" It wasn’t the whaling moratorium that stopped most commercial whaling it was kerosene."
The whole world once heavily relied on whale products. . .really only about 100 years ago.
Oil, kerosene, plastics etc have dramatically changed demand and commercial whale hunting has been decreasing ever since.
Even Australia still operated some whale abattoirs right up to about the 1960s.
They closed because there was little demand left for the products.
Whales are just big, wet cows. Who cares if they're hunted, just don't hunt them to extinction. It wasn't the whaling moratorium that stopped most commercial whaling it was kerosene.
Nobody seems too upset by the slaughter of dugongs, turtles and other wildlife in the north of Australia. It seems a little racist to me that the Japaneses are held to a (percieved) higher standard of behavoir than aborigines.
The International Whaling Commission (IWC) was set up under the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling which was signed in Washington DC on 2nd December 1946. The preamble to the Convention states that its intention is to provide for the proper conservation of whale stocks and thus make possible the orderly development of the whaling industry. Australia is a signatory to the convention and thus supports sustainable whaling.
The IWC imposed a moratorium on commercial whaling until a sustainable level could be determined. The Japanese program of catching whales was to scientifically establish a sustainable level of harvest.
If now the International court of Justice has determined that the program is not for this scientific purpose. The IWC member nations at their next meeting should now determine the level of harvest. Will Australia argue for a zero limit based on emotion and the demands of the greens, or one based on the scientific evidence?