Lisa Franzetta, Animal Legal Defense Fund
(ALDF)
May 2010
When I was in fifth grade, each member of my class was asked to write a research report on the animal of her choice. Though my elementary school “research” technique generally involved awkwardly rephrasing entire entries from the World Book Encyclopedia, I was inspired in my selection by a National Geographic magazine with a cover feature about endangered humpback whales. Like many others, I was captivated by these gigantic, highly intelligent animals, and I mark that report as the beginning of my awareness of animal and environmental issues. At just the age most children are beginning to wrestle with the concept of mortality, I would lie awake in bed at night also pondering the deaths of entire species (making me a very popular guest at sleepover parties).
It was right around this time, in 1986, that the International Whaling Commission (IWC) declared a moratorium on commercial whaling, a horrifically devastating industry that most Americans have been happy to leave buried forever in the 80s trash bin, sandwiched somewhere between Punky Brewster and a pair of giant shoulder pads. Prior to the moratorium, a number of whale populations were on the brink of annihilation, and somewhere between six- and forty-thousand (estimates vary) of these leviathans were being slaughtered each year.
Make no mistake—as anyone who’s tuned in lately for an episode of “Whale Wars” knows, whales continue to be violently harpooned in bloody hunts. Because of loopholes in the current IWC ban, Norway and Iceland assert they have a right to essentially ignore the moratorium, and Japan exploits an exception allowing for whaling in the name of “scientific research,” which is widely regarded as a very thin cover for Japanese commercial whaling operations, which produce illegal whale meat for Japanese tables (the New York Times recently reported that a single whale can bring as much as $100,000 in Japanese fish markets). However, since the moratorium, the number of whales killed each year has dropped to something more like 2,000, and while a number of species still hover perilously close to extinction, numbers are slowly rebounding.
So often at the Animal Legal Defense Fund, we see cases of laws failing to represent the sentiments of our citizenry. For the most part, as a society we believe the abuse of animals or wanton destruction of species should not be tolerated—and yet, our laws frequently lag in reflecting this understanding. Yet in the case of the commercial whaling moratorium, we have an example of a global regulation that actually speaks to the disgust so many of us feel at the slaughter of these magnificent, desperately endangered beings for the sake of profit. And slowly recovering whale populations speak to the fact that, while things could still be much brighter, and critical loopholes must be tightened up, the moratorium is having measurable success. According to National Resources Defense Council senior attorney Joel Reynolds in a recent piece published in the Los Angeles Times, the global ban on commercial whaling “is one of the singular environmental achievements of the 20th century.” OMG. It’s working, people.
So why, then, is the Obama administration backing a plan announced by the International Whaling Commission on April 22—that’s Earth Day, for those of you on irony watch—to lift the ban on commercial whaling for ten years? They argue that by legalizing whaling and bringing it out into the open, the number of whales killed will be reduced, because the whaling nations will have stricter limits placed on their whaling activity. According to The Economist, supporters of lifting the ban, “including Monica Medina, who heads America’s IWC delegation—say the deal seeks to ‘depoliticise’ the whaling that does go on, while laying the ground for a tougher conservation system.”
However, while the plan alludes to a quota in numbers of whales allowed to be killed by the whaling nations, no actual numbers have been agreed upon. And, as Mr. Reynolds lays out:
The exception for scientific whaling exploited by Japan will not be rescinded, nor will the exceptions claimed by Norway and Iceland be nullified. The agreement is fundamentally premised on an expectation that the countries signing the agreement will abide by it, notwithstanding their continuing right under the broader whaling convention to kill whales for research or pursuant to their existing exception. Thus, the fundamental problem of loopholes remains.
Frankly, I find the IWC and Obama administration’s rationale baffling, particularly given that there is absolutely no provision in their proposed deal that would require a phase-out of whaling, in ten years, or ever. And here, I’d like to offer one more block quote from Mr. Reynolds’ piece, because he gets to the heart of the belief—one that is shared by ALDF—that our moral imperative to animals must also be a legal imperative:
(L)egalizing whaling in order to eliminate it makes as little sense as allowing criminal activity in order to eliminate crime. By adopting the moratorium on commercial whaling, the world agreed that whaling, except for purposes of scientific research and subsistence, should not be allowed. Period. By suspending that global norm, the U.S. and the whaling commission will be ceding the legal and even the moral high ground to the very countries that, for decades, have been doing their best to circumvent it. Rather than a step forward in the fight against commercial whaling, this is a monumental step backward.
At the very moment Obama should be asserting the power of the law to protect whale populations from decimation, and individual whales from horrific deaths-by-harpoon for the sake of cultural palate preferences, he is, instead, yielding to a political pragmatism that seems at best myopic, and, at worst, desperately out of touch with reality.
Australia and New Zealand, meanwhile, are truly standing up for their citizens’ interest in protecting endangered whales by walking their talk and rejecting the proposed “compromise deal” outright. Days ago, the Australian government announced plans to move ahead with threatened legal proceedings against Japan for their ongoing “scientific” whale hunt, stating, ''… If we judge that we are unlikely to achieve our objectives diplomatically, the government will be ready to proceed with legal action.'' Meanwhile, New Zealand Foreign Minister Murry McCully has stated that his country is committed to ending whaling, and that a proposal that fails to improve on the status quo will not suffice. “The proposal to include (endangered) fin whales in the southern ocean is inflammatory," McCully said. "New Zealanders will not accept this."
Will Americans?