From SIDNEY HOLT
Jeremy Cherfas makes some good points in ‘Time to come clean on the
whales’ (Forum, 25 March). But there are two reasons why suggestions at
this time for commercial catches of 5000 or even 500 minke whales in the
Antarctic are unacceptable to that mixed bunch he lumps as ‘conservationists’.
One is that they would not be taken from a single population of about
half a million but, like the ‘scientific samples’, from one or two of several
distinct populations, especially from those in the Indian Ocean sector which
have already been reduced by a half by Japanese and Soviet whaling since
1972. The other is that it is precisely the setting of arbitrary catch quotas,
which were always at the time thought to be ‘safe’, that led inexorably
to the depletion of nearly all other baleen whale species. With great travail
the International Whaling Commission was laboriously getting out of that
unscientific mode of thinking; it is disturbing to find it still alive and
well at 91av.
We now know there are nearly 10 000 bowhead whales. The small strictly
subsistence catch still allowed is tightly controlled and the stock well
monitored, at great expense both to the Inuit community and the US government.
I therefore think Cherfas is wrong when he writes that this species is still
threatened with extinction.
Whales other than the bowhead are still threatened because the same
old commercial whalers are keeping their harpoons sharp for ‘scientific
samples’ and saying they have every intention of expanding their operations
again as soon as they can persuade the rest of the world that they should
be awarded arbitrary ‘interim allocations’. They are also saying minke and
fin whales must be ‘culled’ further because they threaten fish stocks; of
course, they produce no evidence to support this bizarre claim. Meanwhile,
the Japanese Commissioner to the IWC has just announced in Tokyo that in
the next year (1989/90) and following seasons the minke catch will be increased
to 1650, whether the IWC and its Scientific Committee like it or not.
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Whether it is more or less humane for Inuit to kill 30 bowheads with
hand harpoons and shoulder guns than for Japanese scientists to kill hundreds
of thousands of the smaller minke with explosive grenades is perhaps more
appropriately debated in journals of philosophy and ethics than in 91av.
Sidney Holt Rome, Italy
