TROUBLED WATERS - Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society

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A REVIEW OF THE WELFARE IMPLICATIONS OF MODERN WHALING ACTIVITIES
breath). Using the current criteria this whale could then be recorded as dead and be hauled on to the
flensing deck whilst still alive.
The IWC criteria tend to be used in an exclusive fashion by whaling nations i.e. the presence or
absence of a single measure is used, rather than the inclusive assessment of several criteria, as is
common practice for assessing death in other species. Furthermore, Japan typically uses motionless
as the main criteria for determining death, although this is not, in fact, one of the IWC criteria
(chapter 11).
Many species of cetacean are adapted for extended dives (Anon 2003) (see chapter 4) and
consequently harpoon strikes to the thoracic region (which might be considered lethal for terrestrial
mammals due to the injury caused to the lung and heart tissue) may not have the same immediate
effects for cetaceans, due to their capacity for functioning using tissue-stored oxygen reserves.
The ‘special case’ of special permit whaling
Japan continues to issue special permits for the killing of whales in scientific research programmes.
However, there has never been unequivocal approval of any of these research proposals by the IWC’s
Scientific Committee. Furthermore, the Commission has expressed considerable concern through
several resolutions on scientific whaling, including, most recently, a call on “the government of Japan
to halt the JARPA program, or to revise it so that it is limited to non-lethal research methodologies” 4 . A
critique of one such programme, the ‘JARPN’ programme, by a number of scientists from the
Scientific Committee during the 2002 Annual Meeting (IWC 2002b) revealed that:
• there are no meaningful quantifiable measures by which to judge the research;
• lethal sampling is not essential to the research, as biopsy sampling could provide genetic and
dietary information;
• Japan describes JARPN II as a “multi-species modelling approach to whale management”; yet no such
approach has been agreed by the Commission.
Concern was further reflected in the statement submitted by 40 scientists from the Scientific
Committee to the 55th Annual Meeting of the IWC in Berlin, in response to Iceland’s proposal to
initiate special permit whaling:
“The proponents have failed to supply adequate justification for the proposed sample sizes, and
have offered no performance criteria for how the work’s ‘feasibility’ will subsequently be
determined”.
Also:
“We reiterate that the major objectives of the Icelandic proposal are either not relevant to the
management of whales under the Revised Management Procedure (RMP), or that the subset of
information which is relevant ... can be – and routinely are – obtained with far greater
efficiency by well-established non-lethal methods”.
And:
“As members of the Scientific Committee, we are seriously concerned by what we see as the
increasingly frequent abuse of Article VIII of the International Convention for the Regulation of
Whaling by some member nations. This has important ramifications for the IWC and the work
of the S.C. Member governments that promote poorly conceived research whaling programmes
place their scientists in the untenable position of having to defend these proposals in order to
support the agendas of their governments” (IWC 2003b).