whale-for-sale

WHALE FOR SALE THE GLOBAL TRADE IN DEAD WHALESpredominantly spinner, Risso’s, rough-toothed, striped and bottlenose dolphins as well as false killerwhales and bottlenose whales 1 and created a ready supply of dolphin meat for human consumption.In some regions where this utilisation of bycaught dolphins had already created a market for dolphinflesh, local fishermen may have been tempted to deliberately harpoon dolphins in order to supplementtheir income and compensate for poor fish catches. These targetted hunts were largely confined tocertain areas, mainly off the south and west coast, where dolphin meat was both consumed and usedas fish bait. Despite whales and dolphins being legally protected in Sri Lankan waters since 1993,deaths have continued and the practice is believed to persist to the present day on an occasional, opportunisticbasis; however, lack of monitoring means that the current scale of catches is uncertain. 2,3St LuciaIn 2000, St Lucia ratified the SPAW Protocol (under UNEP’s Caribbean Environment Programme)which legally protects all whale and dolphin species in its waters. Despite this, fishermen in St Luciamaintain a hunt for pilot and other whales and dolphins, including pygmy and false killer whales,bottlenose dolphins, Atlantic spotted dolphins, Fraser’s dolphins and common dolphins. 1 Little data isavailable regarding the number of animals taken.St Vincent and the Grenadines4SVG: Great whales killed after the moratorium32101987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012ASW Illegal catchMore than 40 whales were killed during this period: mainly humpback whalesSt Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG) is an island nation in the Eastern Caribbean. Bequia, its secondlargest island, has no historical evidence of whaling by indigenous people; rather, whaling began in1875 when William Wallace, a Scottish settler, returned to the island after working on an Americanwhaling vessel. He established a whaling company and passed on techniques for hunting humpbackand sperm whales to his crew, later partnering with French settler, Joseph Ollivierre, who alsoestablished a whaling station on the island. These early hunts focussed primarily on producing whaleoil for commercial export. Only around forty years ago did the operation switch to obtaining meat andblubber for human consumption.SVG joined the IWC in 1981 and since then has been granted an ASW quota for humpback whales, asituation that has long provoked criticism since SVG fails to meet the criteria required from nations wis-{ 37 }