whale-for-sale

WHALE FOR SALE THE GLOBAL TRADE IN DEAD WHALESAbove all, Soviet whaling was characterized by systematic falsification of all data (including dates,numbers, species, size of whales, regions, age and sex) and this, plus the destruction of officialrecords over a period of decades, meant that it was many years before the true scale of the slaughterwas revealed. For example, in 1986, the Soviets reported that they had killed a total of 2,710 humpbacksin the Southern Ocean: in fact their fleets killed nearly 18 times as many, along with thousandsof unreported whales of other species, including around 6,000 minke whales killed in the SouthernOcean in the two years following the moratorium. 1 This subterfuge was accompanied by equallyaudacious methods over many years to stall the IWC’s creation and implementation of an internationalobservation system for whaling activities.The scientific report for the Sovetskaya Rossiya fleet’s 1970-71 season noted that the ship captainsand harpooners who most frequently violated international whaling regulations also received the mostCommunist Party honours. “Lies became an inalienable part and perhaps even a foundation of Sovietwhaling,” Berzin wrote. 2The scale of the hunts is even more shocking, given the lack of any real demand for whale productswithin the Soviet Union. There was some demand for blubber to convert into oil, but usually the restof the carcass would be left to rot in the sea, or at best rendered down into bone meal for agriculturalfertilizer. Why then, were so many tens of thousands of whales killed? The answer, it would appearwas two-fold: firstly, whaling activities were measured using the same metric as the fishing industry,therefore ‘success’ depended on the sheer mass of whales killed and secondly, rigid adherence tothe five-year-plans which drove the Soviet economy meant that those whaling fleets which exceededtargets were rewarded with large bonuses, whereas failure to meet targets might mean captains weredemoted and crew members sacked. 2The Soviet Union objected to the whaling moratorium and that objection remains in place, howeverthe Russian Federation (which replaced the Soviet Union in 1991) has not taken any whales commerciallysince the 1986/7 season.Aboriginal subsistence whaling: Currently, the Chukotka People of Far East Russia qualify for an ASWquota for bowhead and grey whales (which they share with the native peoples of Alaska and, potentially,Washington State). In 2012, 143 Eastern North Pacific grey whales were killed by the Chukotka. Thenew 2013-2018 ASW quota block allows for the Chukotka to catch a total of 744 grey whales over thatperiod, with a maximum of 140 whales in any one year. The Chukotka also share with Alaskan Inuit anASW quota to take 336 bowhead whales, with no more than 67 bowheads to be struck in any one year. 3Dolphin hunts: Quotas are issued for subsistence hunts of around 1,000 belugas per year. In 1999,the Russian government issued permits enabling up to 500 belugas to be killed in the Okhotsk Sea(between Russia and Japan), for export to Japan. Up to 50 belugas were killed in the first few days ofthe hunt and 13 tons of meat and blubber were shipped to Hokkaido. A further 12 belugas were capturedalive for the captivity industry. Although belugas are hunted by aboriginal people in the Arctic,this represented the first purely commercial hunt of belugas since the 1930s, when the populationwas decimated. International protests, including from WDC, forced the Russian government to cancelthe hunt after only 10 days; however nine of the live-captured belugas were subsequently exportedfrom Moscow to Canada. Additional concerns were raised that the meat might be highly contaminatedand thus not meet Japanese health standards. 4Exports: In 1995, an attempt to smuggle whale meat from Taiwan into Japan via the Russian Federationmade the headlines. Around 250 tons of whale meat, which DNA analysis subsequently revealed{ 33 }