What Goes on at the IWC :: IWC Marine Life Whaling Essays

What Goes on at the IWC -------"There Leviathan, Hugest of living creatures, on the deep Stretched like a promontory sleeps or swims, And seems a moving land; and at his gills Draws in, and at his trunk spouts out a sea." Paradise Lost Overexploitation is not limited to land resources alone. Just as our precious terrestrial and coastal habitats are delicate and too easily destroyed, so are the species of the open sea. Whales, some of the biggest and most powerful mammals on earth, are not strong enough to protect themselves from our murderous actions. Since the first few centuries A.D., Japan and Norway have been whaling. The Dutch, British and Americans started a few hundred years ago. In the beginning, small boats and hand-thrown harpoons were used, but as technology advanced to fast motorboats, factory ships (on which whales are hunted for months at a time, killing and processing them at sea) and exploding harpoons, killing ability increased and more whales died. So many more, in fact, that several species have been threatened almost to the point of extinction. The California Gray whale was hunted almost to extinction in the last 1800s, then recovered, was hunted almost to extinction again by factory ships in the 1930s and 1940s, and recovered once more (Bryant). The species has been removed from the endangered species list, but they will be hunted again. The International Whaling Commission (IWC) began regulating whaling in 1946. Regulation consisted of hunting quotas given to member nations, but the quotas were too high and whale populations declined. Many species have been reduced to "commercial extinction" (Doyle) in which they are too rare to be worth hunting, and many local populations have been eliminated. The Northern right whale's numbers are down to 325 in the North Atlantic and only 250 in the North Pacific, and the species is showing no signs of recovery (Bryant). Once blue whales were hunted so that only "about 450 remain [in the Antarctic]. . .two-tenths of one percent of the initial population size" (www.seaweb.org), the fin whale was targeted, then the sei whale, then the minke and humpback. All were hunted down to a fraction of the original populations. In 1982, the IWC passed an indefinite moratorium on all whale hunting, putting an end to almost all commercial whaling, which, at its peak, meant the death of more than 50,000 whales a year. Some species have responded to this protection with increased numbers, and some have not.