Norway is poised to overtake Japan as the world's biggest whale-killer"April is the cruellest month," wrote T.S. Eliot in his famous 1922 poem "The Waste Land."
For almost 2,000 minke whales currently in Norwegian waters, that statement has particular relevance: Norway's whaling season officially began on April 1.
Norway is only one of three countries -- along with Iceland and Japan -- that have defied the international ban on commercial whaling, put in place in 1986 by the International Whaling Commission (IWC).
Now, Norway is set to overtake Japan as the world's biggest whaling nation, with a goal of killing 1,286 whales this year, compared to Japan's target of 1,280.
However, this reality flies in the face of a 2009 opinion poll which found that the majority of Norwegians believe that the suffering inflicted by whaling is unacceptable.
"Norway's own data shows that at least one in five hunted whales suffers a long, agonizing death," said Claire Bass, the Marine Mammals Program Manager for the World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA), in an email. "Some take over an hour to succumb to their injuries."
The poll also found that only 1% of the population regularly eats whale meat. So where will all the meat go?
The whaling industry supplies a black market that is international in scope, with illegal whale meat recently identified in restaurants in the United States and South Korea.
According to Nature, scientists have identified several different whale species in sashimi at restaurants in Santa Monica, California, and Seoul, South Korea, including fin whale, sei whale and Antarctic minke whale.
These three species are listed with the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), an agreement by the members of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) prohibiting the international trade of endangered species.
Instead of whaling, WSPA recommends that Norway pursue whale watching, a lucrative $2.1 billion industry that includes 119 countries.
Incredibly, the IWC is currently considering a ten-year plan to lift the moratorium and legalize commercial whaling, a plan hatched in closed-door meetings with pro-whaling members of the regulating body. In a horribly ironic public relations plan, they will announce their decision on April 22, which happens to be Earth Day.
As the IWC ponders the fate of the whaling ban -- and the lives of thousands of whales -- they would do well take into consideration something else Mr. Eliot wrote:
"It is not necessarily those lands which are the most fertile or most favored climate that seem to me the happiest, but those in which a long stroke of adaptation between man and his environment has brought out the best qualities of both."
Killing these highly intelligent creatures is not adapting. It is regressing on a grand scale.
image: a minke whale hauled aboard a whaling ship (WSPA)
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