TROUBLED WATERS - Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society

eath). Using the current criteria this whale could then be recorded as dead and be hauled on to theflensing deck whilst still alive.The IWC criteria tend to be used in an exclusive fashion by whaling nations i.e. the presence orabsence of a single measure is used, rather than the inclusive assessment of several criteria, as iscommon practice for assessing death in other species. Furthermore, Japan typically uses motionlessas 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) andconsequently harpoon strikes to the thoracic region (which might be considered lethal for terrestrialmammals due to the injury caused to the lung and heart tissue) may not have the same immediateeffects for cetaceans, due to their capacity for functioning using tissue-stored oxygen reserves.128A REVIEW OF THE WELFARE IMPLICATIONS OF MODERN WHALING ACTIVITIESThe ‘special case’ of special permit whalingJapan 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’sScientific Committee. Furthermore, the Commission has expressed considerable concern throughseveral resolutions on scientific whaling, including, most recently, a call on “the government of Japanto halt the JARPA program, or to revise it so that it is limited to non-lethal research methodologies” 4 . Acritique of one such programme, the ‘JARPN’ programme, by a number of scientists from theScientific 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 anddietary information;• Japan describes JARPN II as a “multi-species modelling approach to whale management”; yet no suchapproach has been agreed by the Commission.Concern was further reflected in the statement submitted by 40 scientists from the ScientificCommittee to the 55th Annual Meeting of the IWC in Berlin, in response to Iceland’s proposal toinitiate special permit whaling:“The proponents have failed to supply adequate justification for the proposed sample sizes, andhave offered no performance criteria for how the work’s ‘feasibility’ will subsequently bedetermined”.Also:“We reiterate that the major objectives of the Icelandic proposal are either not relevant to themanagement of whales under the Revised Management Procedure (RMP), or that the subset ofinformation which is relevant ... can be – and routinely are – obtained with far greaterefficiency by well-established non-lethal methods”.And:“As members of the Scientific Committee, we are seriously concerned by what we see as theincreasingly frequent abuse of Article VIII of the International Convention for the Regulation ofWhaling by some member nations. This has important ramifications for the IWC and the workof the S.C. Member governments that promote poorly conceived research whaling programmesplace their scientists in the untenable position of having to defend these proposals in order tosupport the agendas of their governments” (IWC 2003b).