Whales, Whaling and the "International Community"

The following guest blog was written by Dr. Sidney Holt.  Dr. Holt is ASOC's representative at meetings of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) and has decades of IWC experience. 

The proposal by the authorities of the Principality of Monaco that the United Nations offer ‘full and permanent protection’ to all whales and dolphins on the high seas would, I suspect, have come as a surprise to many of those people who are interested in those animals and follow ‘the whaling controversy. (See details on blog ‘The Monaco proposal’)  If they think of it at all most would have come to associate the arguments about their fate with the International Whaling Commission (IWC), with its limited powers and strident claims by the pro-whaling factions that it is ‘dysfunctional’ – although, if it is so, it is they that have deliberately made it that way. But the UN has for long, and in many times and different ways, been involved with whales and dolphins and with whaling. I thought a short review of the history and main features of that involvement might be useful.

Welfare, Rights, Respect, Speciesism and Scientific Whaling

The following guest blog was written by Dr. Sidney Holt.  Dr. Holt is ASOC's representative at meetings of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) and has decades of IWC experience. 

Yesterday a friend sent me a marvelous, and immensely moving video-clip. It was about a pair of elephants, clan friends, who had been taken into captivity and separated for twenty years, then brought together again and released from their cages. The video recorded their recognition and reuniting ceremony; it can only be called love. I wished we could similarly see the release of a long-captive orca and its reunion with its wild family.

The cruelty of whaling has long been an intermittent concern of some people who have attended meetings of the International Whaling Commission (IWC). The first NGO to attend the IWC as an Observer was, I think, the Universities Federation for Animal Welfare (UFAW) and early on Dr Harry Lilley brought his accounts of the prolonged deaths of fin and blue whales in the Antarctic, seen from his perch as doctor in residence on one of the British factory ships. Later, more joined in – the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), the Animal Welfare Institute (AWI), the Royal Society for the Protection of Animals,, the World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA), Humane Society International (HIS), the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), Cetacean Society International and others. They were mostly pre-occupied with the horrors of slow death and the escape of mortally wounded animals. I think they were not always looking at exactly the right bit of the process. The chase, between the sighting and the harpoon launch and bomb explosion is the most stressful for the animal in all hunts, at least those for the fast-swimming rorquals. In human terms it is the torture before the execution. And there is a world of difference between trying to improve the living and working conditions of slaves and abolishing slavery.

More Aquatic Massacres and Holocausts

Dr. Sidney Holt is ASOC's representative at meetings of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) and has decades of IWC experience. The following guest blog by Dr. Holt compares whaling operations to other examples of trade in mammal products.

Fra il dire e il fare ce il mare

My son, Tim, reminded me of this old Italian saying when he read my promise of a moratorium on blog writing: ‘Between the saying and the doing is the ocean!’. I was thinking about patterns of killings after writing my piece on the Spice Islands a couple of weeks ago. Another Anglo-Dutch competitive-cooperative episode followed the Nutmeg caper. It was all about reaching Indonesia and Cathay (China) by ship from Northwest Europe without running the gauntlet of Portuguese and Spanish sea-power. Incomplete geography seemed to offer two possible routes, both through the Arctic region – a Northeast Passage and a Northwest one.

In 1607 Henry Hudson, a British adventurer, was employed by a consortium of merchant companies in London – including the English East India Company – to find a Northeastern route. He failed, but found an awful lot of whales, tried again, failed again, then the London companies said ‘Enough, already’. Henry them found employment with England’s merchant rivals, the Dutch East India Company, tried again (in a ship with a mixed crew of Dutch and English who couldn’t talk to each other), couldn’t make it and turned west and tried for the Northwest route. He reached the Hudson River bneary what would later become New Amsterdam – more precisely Coney island -, and went up it thinking it might lead him to China, found that it didn’t, went down to Delaware, then up to the Hudson strait that leads into Hudson Bay. His crew got fed up with this, mutinied, set Henry off to die in an open boat, and went home themselves. A few years later other British and Dutch adventurers went over and, although the riches of Cathay were enticing decided that immediate profit from furs – traded with ‘the aborigines’ – looked like a better deal. They came from many wild mammal species but eventually most profitably from beavers.

More Madness

Dr. Sidney Holt is ASOC's representative at meetings of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) and has decades of IWC experience. The following guest blog by Dr. Holt provides more background on mid-twentieth century whaling operations, and the shamefully unscientific positions taken by many countries at the IWC that ultimately resulted in the widespread depletion of many whale species.  

“The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of a doubt, what is laid before him.”

Leo Tolstoy, 1897.

While the Icelanders were killing blue, fin and sei whales through the unregulated post-WWII decades, Denmark was reporting large kills, at about half of Iceland’s rate, in the same period: mostly fins and sei but also the occasional blue whale. These were actually being taken in Denmark’s colony of the Faroe Islands. All the large whales around there were soon obliterated and Faoroes whaling ended with a whimper in 1968. This illustrated the dismal history of most North Atlantic ‘modern whaling’, exemplified best by Norway, and also in, for example Shetland, the Hebrides and even Labrador. The Norwegian entrepreneurs had enormous success from land stations in the early years of the twentieth century; the local stocks were quickly exterminated and bit by bit the Norwegians moved south. By the time of  WWII some stocks had evidently begun to increase or regroup, and after the war several oldland-stations were re-opened, and new ones constructed in a number of places to take advantage of the ‘recovering’ whales. They were soon closed again – except in Iceland.

While Christian Loftsson’s crews were ‘harvesting’ blue whales the pelagic whalers in the IWC were plotting to abolish the Baleen whale Sanctuary that the negotiators in 1938 (Article II of the 1938 Protocol to the 1937 Principle Whaling Agreement) and 1946 had thoughtfully designated in the Eastern Pacific sector of the Antarctic. This was an important objective for Japan from the moment it first attended the IWC in 1951. Its antagonism was perhaps understandable: Japan had not been involved in either the 1938 or 1946 negotiations, and this Pacific sector was the most easily accessible part of the Antarctic to Japanese factories; the Europeans all entered the Antarctic by way of the Atlantic, and the Soviets, at that time with only one factory, via the Black Sea, Mediterranean, Suez, Red Sea and Indian Ocean.

It's a Mad, Mad, Whaling World

Dr. Sidney Holt is ASOC's representative at meetings of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) and has decades of IWC experience. The following guest blog by Dr. Holt discusses the history of Iceland's whaling operations.

Studying history can make you weep but occasionally despair is temporarily seasoned by merriment. “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce” wrote Karl Marx. How true!

The Icelandic delegation to the IWC has behaved pretty obnoxiously, sometimes outright aggressively, since the country rejoined the IWC in October 2002  with a fake ‘objection’ (reservation to the commercial whaling moratorium), courtesy of the Swedish Chairman’s casting vote. But it didn’t start there.

Let’s begin with Nice Land, Iceland. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century ‘modern whaling’, Norwegian style, was a controversial subject among the population of Iceland, but eventually, in 1935 the Danish colonial Government licensed a whaling station and also decided that only Icelandic nationals could participate in whaling in the nation’s territorial waters. The company running that station went out of business in 1939. Post-war a new company was formed, Hvalur H/F  - owner and General Manager then and now Mr Kristjan Loftsson - and his company converted an old US Navy base into a whaling station. Norwegians trained the Icelanders until the early 1950s.

ASW, Depletion and Extinction

Dr. Sidney Holt is ASOC's representative at meetings of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) and has decades of IWC experience. The following guest blog by Dr. Holt analyzes the history of determining appropriate catch limits in the IWC.

Many outside observers and commentators assume that when the International Whaling Commission sets a zero commercial catch limit for some whale species  and putative populations it means that stock has been ‘depleted’ (A term little used by the IWC and undefined) and its existence in some way ‘threatened’. That is not so. The zero limits authorized under the New Management Procedure adopted in 1975 for ‘Protection Stocks’ has nothing whatsoever to do with ‘endangerment’. It was, and still is, an implementation of the requirement of the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling 1946 (ICRW) that the IWC act to “achieve the optimum level of whale stocks as rapidly as possible’. That can best be achieved, according to the scientists, by pausing exploitation.  Exactly the same consideration applies to the Revised Management Procedure (RMP), the moratoria and the designations of ‘no take’ sanctuaries.

In 1976 the IWC decided, for better or for worse, that the overall ‘optimum’ is attained when a stock is at 60% of its original number before exploitation began, the so-called ‘carrying capacity’ or, in the SC’s quaint and faintly sexist, possibly irreligious terms, ‘virgin’. A supplementary requirement of the ICRW is that this be done in such a way as not to “cause widespread economic and nutritional distress.” As far as commercial whaling was concerned it was thought that this would be met by allowing limited whaling on stocks that were found to be somewhat less than the optimum. The decision was not to set zero limits unless the stock was more than 10% below the optimum, that is 54% of the ‘virgin’. That -10% was the subject of prolonged and rather rowdy controversy when the SC was, at a special meeting in Seattle, trying to decide how precisely to implement the Commission’s 1974 decision in principle. Naturally scientists from the whaling countries wanted the cut-off to be much more than 10% less than optimal, others had miscellaneous views; the decision was largely arbitrary, but the consequences of  various options were looked at. Some countries – guess which! – said let’s do the stock assessments, then decide on the cut off, but reasonable caution and natural scepticism prevailed and the various cut-off implications were examined and agreed after simulations had been carried out (admittedly rather primitive ones, given the absence of computers at the time.)

When, very soon after that, it came to looking at Aboriginal Subsistence Whaling the ‘economic distress’ criterion was obviously irrelevant but the ‘nutritional distress’ bit obviously was relevant. So the zero threshold for those activities was shifted down to reflect perceived danger of either extinction or at least possibly irreversible further depletion.

The scientific problem was to know where was that threshold. The scientists thought they knew where was the economic optimum and could estimate it. I was one of them, and I think they were wrong on both counts. But the reality was that if we did not all agree on something there would be no regulation of commercial whaling. Pseudoscientific arguments were offered for 50%, 70%, 80% and we settled on 60%. But where does the threat of extinction loom? In a footnote in the Schedule of the ICRW the Commission has inserted an impossible task for the scientists: “On the advice of the SC (the Commission) shall establish as far as possible a minimum stock level below which whales shall not be taken” and “a rate of increase towards the MSY level (60%for each stock. These last words are unfortunate in giving, as they do, the idea that we humans can tell the whales how fast to breed, how fast to die naturally, and even how density dependent those instructions are to be. So goes international discourse.

The matter was complicated by the Commission’s decision to ask the Secretary to edit the entire ICRW Schedule to get rid of thirty years of legalistic debris. It was decided – quite wrongly, I think – to remove all references to Protected Species on the grounds that the NMP could set zero catch limits. So out of the IWC window went the protection of grey and right whales. But the protected species decisions, from 1931 on, were not about optimization commercial whaling; they were about protecting some seriously depleted species and population from the threat of extermination and if possible allowing their long-term recovery.

As to the Schedule footnote, the first thing to be said is that it reflects the fashionable obsessions with numerical  stock ‘levels’ as if it does not matter whether a threatened population consists mainly of juveniles or a mixture of young and old, or whether it has a viable sex-ratio. But, even ignoring that absurdity the second thing to be said is that none of the population dynamics models or theory used by the SC contains the essential feature of any consideration of an extermination process – that is depensation: the consideration that as a population is depleted at some point the stabilizing (negative feedback) processes creating density-dependence go into reverse so that the rate of population change as the population declines further becomes negative (positive feedback)  That will have very nasty consequences – not just accelerating decline but possible irreversible collapse

An aside: I have noticed that public commentators on climate change – even those working for the BBC- Goodness gracious! – are quite often using the phrase ‘negative feedback’ to mean a feedback process having negative - i.e unwanted by us, even run-away consequences. If one wants stability rather than collapse or chaos negative feedback is just the ticket. That error is even worse than another popular one: citing the speed of a ship as in ‘knots per hour’ (BBC again, sadly). Close of today’s Pedants Corner.

As to the nutritional needs of aboriginal whalers and their families and societies, approaching thresholds for total extinction is clearly not in their interest: they don’t want to go out hunting for rare animals. A rational level – if we really must go on talking about just numbers – is, I suppose, somewhere between that abundance where depensation sets in and the pretty arbitrary level set for the NMP, and which, incidentally, is more or less replicated in the high-tuning version of the RMP agreed by the IWC (but not used by those whalers – Icelandic large-type  fin and Norwegian small-type minke - who now claim to be applying the RMP on a national basis. The question to be put, I suggest, is: What minimum abundance and appropriate population composition makes it worthwhile for aboriginal people to continue their traditions. And, of course, that depends on the changing state of their societies and the availability of other nutritional choices as much as it does on the whales. The subsistence whalers, and the whale-watchers, using as they sometimes do the same whale populations, need the same thing in order to continue their old and new traditions in peace if not harmony: not too few whales, not too many, but just right.

Un Piccolo Divertimento

Dr. Sidney Holt is ASOC's representative at meetings of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) and has decades of IWC experience. The following guest blog by Dr. Holt compares modern economic conditions with those of the past. 

I have been mugging up on the relations in the 17^th century between the Kingdom of England, Scotland and Wales (not yet ‘United’ because Northern Ireland had not yet been ‘integrated’) and the Republic of the United Netherlands. Being a republican myself I have long been fascinated by the economic, scientific and artistic vigour of that daughter of the liberation movement of the people of the Netherlands from their Spanish and Frankish oppressors. A revolutionary republic that can produce the likes of Rembrandt, Vermeer, the astronomer and mathematician Christian Huygens, and Anton van Leeuwenhoek, who founded the science of microscopy by squinting at protozoa, can’t be all bad.

It all started with my looking up trains to Lowestoft, in Suffolk, England, where I plan to attend an ICES workshop on fish population dynamics in October. That bustling, ugly town (there are still some interesting old bits, though, with narrow lanes – scores - running down cliffs to the flats – the denes - where hundreds of Scottish fisherwomen used to pack herrings in barrels of salt for export to the Soviet Union) was not so long ago a major fishing port – herring gill-netting and plaice trawling mostly. It’s just a few miles from the beautiful little seaside town of Southwold where I lived when I worked at the famous Lowestoft Fisheries Laboratory – at least that was its name until Mrs Thatcher’s bureaucrats changed it to the un-memorable Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science and chopped its budget. Southwold was once a major port for the Royal Navy, then one stormy night its river moved – no harbour left. Southwold is now the home of Adnams brewery, makers of the best Real Beer in England, in my opinion. Off Southwold was fought, in 1672, the first great sea battle of the Third Anglo-Dutch war (The first big battle of the Second Anglo-Dutch war was fought off Lowestoft. Dutch historians say the Republic won; the British say the Anglo-French joint navy won. Whatever. One outcome was that a lot of Dutch sailors, finding themselves in the cold North Sea, swam ashore, married local English girls and built houses that look just like those in Amsterdam. I forget what the third war was all about, but the first was over the herring fisheries of the Southern Bight. Oh, yes, the second was provoked by the English because the Restored Charles II wanted his nephew William of Orange to rule the Netherlands, and the third led to William of Orange becoming King of England and the Netherlands.

So, what’s all this to do with whaling, you may reasonably ask? Pacienza!

During the century or more that the English and Dutch were sparring in the North and adjacent Seas, their Dutch East Indies and English East Indies Companies were slugging it out in the region of the spice islands, in the Moluccas, part of what is now Indonesia.  The Dutch company had moved in first, aiming to secure a monopoly in the immensely valuable spice trade – nutmeg, mace, cloves and cinnamon, just like the Norwegians down in the Antarctic early in the 20^th century with their ‘modern whaling’ technique.  The Dutch certainly didn’t want to share the trade with the pushy English, and many heads fell in discouragement. Basically the Dutch won and eventually the English went elsewhere. But while they were both operating in that part of the world they had a common objective of pushing out the Portuguese (who had themselves earlier pushed out the Ottoman traders), Spanish and Chinese – sound familiar: German and Japanese whalers pre-WWII, several others after it?  The point was that it was essential to limit, even to reduce, spice production in order to support their high market prices in Europe. There was attempted control of whale oil production in the 1930s, controlled, at first essentially by companies, not governments. The strange thing is that while all that was going on there happened to be Japanese mercenaries around; one of them fell into Dutch hands and got very, very badly treated in ways not to be recorded in a public blog. What were they up to? Looking for whales?

One Dutch idea was to uproot all the nutmeg trees on some of the Banda islands. I suppose the Antarctic equivalent would be to decide to exterminate, say, the humpback whales, or perhaps all the species in just one Southern Ocean sector to maintain the price of oil from blue and fin whales. The spicers even had a sort of Blue Whale Unit to take account of the differing prices of various types of vegetable matter in one big spice bag. Eventually the Dutch company, which issued loans and fancy bonds and accumulated huge debts, approached bankruptcy and had to be bailed out by the immensely wealthy Republic (‘too big to fail’), a process that led fatally to the decline of the Republic and its eventual extinction. Meanwhile the English had gone elsewhere in their growing Empire and planted spice trees on some of the nicest warm islands – nutmeg on Grenada and Zanzibar, cinnamon on Mahé, Seychelles. Sound familiar again? The Seychelles colony also did very nicely with vanilla, but that came from an orchid unique to Mexico. One neat territorial exchange at the end of the Second Anglo-Dutch war was that the Dutch got the nutmeg island of Run and the English got New Amsterdam and renamed it New York. Unscrupulous Connecticut traders were said to whittle fake nutmeg nuts out of hard wood. Such ingenuity has Homo sapiens economicus.

Ah, yes, I now remember: Lowestoft is famous not only for its kippers but also for its fine porcelain – technology brought by the Navy from China - and as the birthplace of one of England’s best modern music composers – Benjamin Britten.

Let's take a look at ASW

Dr. Sidney Holt is ASOC's representative at meetings of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) and has decades of IWC experience. The following guest blog by Dr. Holt analyzes aboriginal subsistence whaling (ASW) in the context of the IWC. 

The IWC gathering in Panama next June is likely to be dominated by consideration of so-called aboriginal subsistence catch and strike limits for Denmark, Russia, St Vincent and Grenadines and the United States., even though for most of us the agenda items on the participation of civil society and the South Atlantic Sanctuary are far more important (Thank goodness we don’t have to deal with any pretence by Iceland that its illegal hunt for fin whales is for ‘subsistence’, though its whalers are at least ‘aboriginal’ in the sense that the place is thought to have been uninhabited before the Norsemen colonised it). Japan will surely, as usual, try to use this farce to squeeze ‘concessions’ especially from the US, and if by chance it decides – for economic, logistic and political reasons not to go down to the Antarctic this coming season to collect scientific samples then we can be sure it will demand a quid pro quo for making such a sacrifice – probably the long-sought legitimization of coastal minke hunts in the Northwest Pacific.

We must hope that the inter-governmental consultations to take place before the Panama meeting to decide what is a quorum in the IWC will have been fruitful, but I wouldn’t bet on it. One legalistic point of practical interest is that in agreeing to a Convention parts of which can be amended by vote of members participating in a meeting, and without specifying in the primary text a quorum, the negotiators opened a way in which a formal treaty can be modified by a minority of the Parties to it. In the early days of the IWC, even when there were far fewer member states than now, several Parties failed to turn up at some annual meetings. Although in browsing through old Verbatim Records of Plenary Sessions (after they became available; for many years they were ‘classified’) I did not find challenges to the Chairman’s call to vote regarding a quorum, but some successful binding votes were surely taken by a minority of Parties.

Prohibitions and Permissions

Dr. Sidney Holt is ASOC's representative at meetings of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) and has decades of IWC experience. The following guest blog by Dr. Holt summarizes the history of the shift from permitting whaling to prohibiting whaling.

The approaches by companies and governments to the problems of facilitating the ‘orderly’ conduct of the whaling industry, ensuring its future if possible, and conserving the whale resources for the sake of human society and for their own sake, have evolved through the century of existence of ‘modern whaling’ with powered vessels and cannon firing harpoons. The ideological and procedural evolution has been from a dominance of everything is permitted except that which is prohibited to everything is prohibited except that which is permitted. Negotiation of the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling (ICRW) in 1946 marks roughly a time of transition.

This is evident from the references in Article V.1 that define what the International Whaling Commission (IWC) can and cannot do. It is empowered to adopt regulations (a) to ‘fix’ both protected and unprotected species; (b) both open and closed seasons: (c) both open and closed waters including the designation of sanctuary areas. Other provisions are mostly permissive: (e) fix the times and methods of whaling, (f) fix types and specifications of gear, apparatus and appliances which may be used.  In practice most regulations draw on two or all three of the a-b-c permissions/prohibitions, and even also on d and/or e – such as not killing humpback whales in a certain area and at a certain time, and not using factory ships.

The basically one dimensional Prohibition measures that have continued in one form or another for most of the IWC’s history are for (a) – Protected Species and something not originally provided for specifically: the protection of calves, sucklings and mothers accompanied by calves.,  and sexually immature animals, although this was mostly in practice referred as (d) : body size limits, that were always in place for all species except the minke whale.

All right whales were designated as Protected in the Convention for the Regulation of Whaling 1931 of the League of Nations. This convention applied only to baleen whales , and whaling by aboriginals for subsistence was specifically excluded from its provisions. .The definition of such whaling was, however, quite different from what it is legally taken to mean today – no motorized vessels or firearms could be used, and products could not be sold or traded with third persons. The area to which the convention applied was defined as “all waters of the world, including the high seas and territorial and national waters”. At that time nations that were in a position to declare territorial Seas all held to a three nautical mile zone, as defined in 1702 by the Dutch Jurist Cornelius Bynkershoek on the basis of a calculation by an Italian, Ferdinand Galiami, of the parabolic trajectory of a cannonball. I presume that ‘national waters’ here means ‘internal waters’, that is those waters landward of the baseline from which the territorial sea is established. They differ from the territorial waters in that no ‘innocent passage’ by foreign-flagged ships is tolerated through them.

CITES - Better Still

Dr. Sidney Holt is ASOC's representative at meetings of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) and has decades of IWC experience. The following guest blog by Dr. Holt provides further information on the topic of transparency in international meetings. 

My good friend Peter Puerschel, who has been attending the CITES Standing Committee meeting in Geneva about which I wrote, ‘observing’ on behalf of IFAW, has clarified and put me right on a few things. Peter is always meticulous and prompt.

Norway changed its vote to favouring transparency, on a Point of Order, saying its delegate had not understood what was going on. That reminded me of an occasion long ago when I was attending a huge conference in FAO in Rome, when the delegate for Ecuador stood up, waving his arms at the interpreters all in their little boxes, shouting “When I say ‘no’, I mean ‘yes’ ”. Pandemonium! Two hours of procedural debate. Changing your mind publicly is a no-no in inter-governmental discourse and getting permission to do so normally requires itself a two-thirds majority vote. The delegate of Ecuador could, and did, try to blame the interpreters, but Norwegian diplomats – and even Norwegians generally - usually speak English better than most Brits. That excuse won’t wash this time.

Anyway the revised CITES vote was more than satisfactory. Only two others now favoured the Kuwaiti move – Dominica and Botswana (A real pity about Dominica; they have been quite good in the IWC lately). The Latin Americans who had supported Kuwait – Colombia and Costa Rica - abstained this time, along with three others including Japan. Roll call was 3:8 and the NGO observers were allowed back inside.

Peter clarified that the membership of the Standing Committee is 15 and they represent regional blocs, but delegates from many other Parties to CITES were attending, without votes.

This matter of transparency will be a major item at next year’s meeting of the IWC. Action on a UK proposal strongly supporting more transparency, presented in Jersey last July, was postponed in order to break a deadlock over the perhaps more pressing matter of stopping the corruption arising from some countries paying their IWC dues in bundles of cash or cheques drawn on private bank accounts. We all know what will be Japan’s position on transparency – it is even opposed to translucency - but it will be interesting to see what Colombia and Costa Rica do. Will they break from the Buenos Aires Group (BAG) consensus in favour of transparency?

Up the Norse!

Dr. Sidney Holt is ASOC's representative at meetings of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) and has decades of IWC experience. The following guest blog by Dr. Holt provides information on the topic of transparency in international meetings, which can sometimes be hard to come by. 

It is nice to be able to write something good about Norway. Let me explain.

A few days ago the Standing Committee (31 pf 175 Parties) of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) was discussing the threats to elephants from the ivory trade, involving especially China. Kuwait proposed that representatives of ‘Civil Society' (code for NGOs) be excluded from the room. A vote was taken, giving seven votes to Kuwait’s proposal and six against, with two abstentions – a half of the members of the Committee didn’t show up, apparently. The NGO Observers were thrown out.  This naturally caused a huge row, on a matter of principle. That led to another voting round, and apparently Norway changed its position from ‘throw out the NGOs’ to ‘let them back in’, and several more countries abstained. In trooped the observers, smiles all around.

I have no idea why Norway shifted. Maybe the delegate was told by Oslo that ‘This very democratic country supports transparency’. Or he – or maybe a she – had doubts, couldn’t sleep, suffered a crisis of conscience...Qui sa?

Several things about that event are more worrying. The Latin American members of the Standing Committee voted with Kuwait, against transparency, yet the same Latin Americans in the International Whaling Commission say they strongly favour transparency and NGO involvement.

Anyway, in the IWC we are used to the weirdness of Norway’s voting actions. – like its invention of the position of ‘not abstaining but not voting’. I have yet to find any old hand who understands the difference. But my hope is that if and when the Latin Americans’ proposal for a South Atlantic whale sanctuary is voted upon in Panama next June Norway will have the sense to break from Japan’s demeaning stranglehold, and deep hatred of what the IWC calls ‘closed waters’, and support it.

Norwegians As Whalers: Once Like The Parson’s Egg – Good In Parts; Now Wasteful, Deceitful And Apparently Unprincipled.

Dr. Sidney Holt is ASOC's representative at meetings of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) and has decades of IWC experience. The following guest blog by Dr. Holt analyzes the evolution of the Norwegian position on whaling. 

Norwegians, having invented ’Modern Whaling’, and sharing a near monopoly with Britain in the Antarctic in the 1930s and late 1940s, led in proposing rules that they claimed were to promote conservation. That was partly true though, as ever, the other driver was profit, and measures to limit the catches of blue, fin, humpback and sei whales in the Antarctic were driven by a need to limit production of whale oil in order to support its price. They ultimately failed largely because new arrivals Japan and Germany wouldn’t play, and other – fish and vegetable – sources of oil for margarine production were arriving.

Norwegian companies, and eventually their Government, advocated the full utilization of the carcasses of killed whale and required, for example, that factory-ships carry equipment for extracting oil from the skeleton and muscle (before whale meat became a viable commodity) as well as from the oil-rich blubber, and that the muscle be reduced to marketable ‘meal’. Some of the Norwegians also wanted to end the use of dead blue whales as buoys and ships’ fenders.

Compassion and the Need for It

Dr. Sidney Holt is ASOC's representative at meetings of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) and has decades of IWC experience. The following guest blog by Dr. Holt provides excerpts on the topic of compassion and whaling, as promised by Dr. Holt in a previous post. 

One death: Harry Lillie’s account.

“Southern Harvester was at Leith harbour, South Georgia. Her sister, Southern Venturer, [The two Salvesen factories - SJH] was making ready ‘to travel through the Straits of Magellan, to spend six weeks hunting sperm whales off Peru, in the plankton- and fish-rich Humboldt Current. It is the haunt of the small female Sperms with their young as well as the big males, and where these creatures have been seen to gather round a stricken harpooned comrade regardless of their own safety.’ Jack Flynn, one of the electricians, is speaking from his armchair. ‘Well, Doc, there won’t be many more years of Caronda [Mount Caronda overlooks S. Georgia – SJH] or South Georgia if this whale-killing goes on the way it is. As many wasted this year as ever, left out to rot with flags stuck in them. It’s wicked, but each factory is worse than the next. Those folk that attend whaling conferences should come right down here and see for themselves,  but they just take anybody’s word for what goes on. ,…And wait, Doc, till you see what happens to whaling now the Blues are getting more scarce. They’ll bawl to be allowed to kill humpbacks again, but kick like hell at the suggestion of your ten years of protection for the Blues. I tell you, they’re oil mad.’”

There's Deals an' Deals

Dr. Sidney Holt is ASOC's representative at meetings of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) and has decades of IWC experience. The following guest blog by Dr. Holt analyzes the various proposals for a "deal" between pro- and anti-whaling countries.  

In blogs I wrote after the IWC meeting in Agadir, Morocco last year I voiced concern (http://www.mywhaleweb.com) about the continued presence, within the walls of the International Whaling Commission, of the Trojan Horse containing the ‘elements of a ‘deal’ that was being touted at an inter-sessional IWC meeting in Florida and at the Agadir meeting, where – thankfully – it failed to attract sufficient support. There are still those who like the idea of a capitulation by conservationists (unusually, the supporters of law and order in the ocean realm) and I wonder now what ‘elements’ are still lurking in there and may be secretly re-grouping.

So I thought to get in first, publicly, with my suggestions for a fair deal, that is one that would be a fair compromise, not legitimising illegitimate practices as did the original mother-lode. So, here goes:

'Because we can'

Dr. Sidney Holt is ASOC's representative at meetings of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) and has decades of IWC experience. The following guest blog by Dr. Holt discusses the why the structure of the IWC enables countries to opt out of following the same rules as other member states.

'Because we can' - That’s what a young, masked looter in London told a TV reporter when he was asked ‘Why are you doing this?’ The second part of his response was made pointing across the Thames from Lewisham on the South Bank to Canary Wharf, one of London’s financial nuclei, on the north: ‘They make lots of money and stuff without working, why shouldn’t we, who also haven’t got jobs?’

In a way that is what Japan’s ‘scientific whaling’ in the Antarctic has been about – Because we Can.  There has been much media talk about this matter saying there is a huge loophole in the commercial whaling moratorium declared by the International Whaling Commission in 1982. There isn’t. And ‘Why does the IWC give quotas for that?’ It doesn’t. And ‘Why doesn’t the IWC put a stop to it?’ It can’t. This all arises from the simple fact that one of the purposes of the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling 1946 was to provide an umbrella for an IWC but it has other purposes, nothing to do with the IWC, including legitimizing unregulated killing of whales for science, just what is ‘science’ being decided exclusively by the killer.

Back to the Future

Dr. Sidney Holt is ASOC's representative at meetings of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) and has decades of IWC experience. The following guest blog by Dr. Holt provides some background on Japan's political strategy at the IWC.  

Let me return to the Great Massacre, in which I have now also enlisted the iconic sperm whale along with the Great Baleens. Those who perpetrated that have left the scene, just as the English city looters drifted away with their booty and sold it for better things. Some are still hanging around, perhaps hoping to pick up a few remnants.

Japanese ‘scientific’ whalers and their supporters in the bureaucracy and the political circus are now doing that – hanging around. They remind me of vultures cleaning up after the lions’ feast. Are they pursuing the Final Solution, with their eyes on the ‘little’ minke whales? If not, what are they doing, or rather why are they still doing, at considerable cost to the Japanese taxpayers, what they have been doing since 1987? And following the classic tactic of demonizing the survivors – they’re immoral, eating our fish, breeding too fast, spoiling the lives of their bigger brethren. The parallels would be risible were they not sad, even pathetic.

Size Matters

Dr. Sidney Holt is ASOC's representative at meetings of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) and has decades of IWC experience. The following guest blog by Dr. Holt discusses the importance of size in measuring the health of whale populations. 

Last time around I promised to write about growth.

In his recent fine book, ‘Mismanagement of marine Fisheries: (Cambridge University Press, 2010) Dr Alan Longhurst discusses the significance of the little-appreciated fact that fishes differ from terrestrial and aerial vertebrates by growing throughout their lives. That actually provides the rationale for the Theory of Fishing that concentrates on the fate of cohorts of fish that are exploited by fishing gears during some period of their natural lives, with individuals increasing in weight as they age, and dying at various rates from a number of natural causes. Through the years of commercial whaling the myth has grown that whales do not grow much, if at all, once they have reached the size at which they become liable to being harpooned, what we call ‘recruited’. In fact they all do grow, and I think the evidence is that they grow throughout their lives (though of course at a diminishing rate). The vertebrates that are somehow bound by gravity – terrestrial mammals, bats and birds for example - can continue to function only by limiting their growth, whereas the fishes and whales defy most of the restrictions of gravity. (I’m not sure what to think about frogs and dinosaurs!)

The Mass Sacrifice of Whales to the God Mammon

Dr. Sidney Holt is ASOC's representative at meetings of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) and has decades of IWC experience. The following guest blog by Dr. Holt, gives background on the true depth of the destruction caused by commercial whaling.

Originally I thought to write about the Great Massacre of whales in the Antarctic, from about 1910 to the mid-1970s. But that word seems now to be used mainly for instances in which numbers of humans are deliberately killed and mutilated, rather than for sustained killings that are aimed at exterminating entire populations. The original Greek word was descriptive of the killing of non-humans so I thought it reasonable to rescue the word from its typical use as the mass killing of Jews, Communists, Russian prisoners of war and other dissenters in the expanding Empire of Nazi Germany. The Ancient Greek holocausts were dedicated to a variety of pagan Gods, the Nazi effort to The Final Solution, the onslaught on the whales was carried out in homage to the God Mammon.

There’s Science, and then there’s Science.

Dr. Sidney Holt is ASOC's representative at meetings of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) and has decades of IWC experience. The following guest blog by Dr. Holt, gives background on the how the IWC's Scientific Committee operates.

In my previous post I described the role of the United Nations in 1972 in forcing slightly open the International Whaling Commission, facilitating the IWC’s shift to regulating commercial whaling on a species by species, population by population basis, as its scientists had long asked. But few scientists liked the idea of a moratorium. This was ostensibly because they said that data from whaling operations were necessary for making assessments and drawing conclusions about the states of the whale ‘stocks’. Some also argued that if there were to be closures, short- or long-term, they should be set up as ‘experiments’ allowing comparison of what happened in the closed areas with what happened where whaling continued. Many found it difficult to think of such a move as a conservation measure rather than as a sort of scientific game.We heard exactly the same arguments when sanctuaries were being discussed and when the actual moratorium of 1982 debated. It was not until the 1990s, during the IWC Scientific Committee’s (SC’s) development of a Revised Management Procedure (RMS) that it was eventually generally accepted that data from commercial operations had little scientific value.

The SC’s reactionary position was not unexpected. After all it is composed of scientists nominated by member governments and generally beholden to them. Exceptional individuals have stood out against the compliant majority and sometimes taken leading elected positions in the Committee. There come to mind the eminent Norwegian biologist Professor Johan Ruud who chaired the SC during the 1960s (and had the courage to resign when his government acted against a prior commitment to abide by scientific advice in setting precautionary catch limits), and Douglas Chapman, professor of mathematics at the University of Washington, who led the Committee in the 1970s. A step was taken in depoliticizing the SC when it agreed to invite the participation of some independent scientists, provided they took no direct part in formulating management advice to the Commission. That did not completely depoliticise the SC because the ‘independents’ were selected by the Committee’s officers that are appointed by the national delegations, in a sort of parody of democracy.

When we in the Seychelles’ delegation presented, in 1982, our proposal for an indefinite commercial moratorium, beginning in 1986, we softened the pill of indefiniteness by providing for a review of the decision by 1990 at the latest, and for a comprehensive assessment of the effects of the moratorium decision. Not surprisingly the SC was quite unable to determine what if any changes had occurred as a result of the moratorium only four years after it came into effect. But the provision had not been a stupid one; as the records of the 1982 debate show. The intention had been not so much to attempt the impossible, of detecting recoveries of whale populations, but rather of assessing the consequences of the pause in whaling for human communities, industry and commerce in the whaling countries. In 1982 not only were ‘the usual suspects’ engaged in commercial whaling – Japan, Norway, Iceland, but also many others: Spain, Peru, Chile, Brazil, USSR, Republic of Korea, all serving Japan’s meat market.. Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and China had ceased whaling only a few years earlier.

What was clear, however, was that there should be a long-term programme of scientific research to monitor and try to understand the recovery of the devastated Southern Ocean ecosystem whose whales had now been placed under protection. Nothing of that kind was ever attempted. Instead a perversion of the ‘comprehensive assessment’ idea was invented by the delegation of Japan and nurtured by the IWC Secretariat. The assessments were to be little more than a re-examination of the old data, mainly from the whaling operations, species by species, area by area, putative population by population, employing computers and some new methods of analysis. Much more important was the launching of efforts to count minke whales in the Antarctic and North Pacific by the conduct of systematic visual sightings surveys, mostly paid for by the Government of Japan, in addition to its conduct of ‘scientific’ exploitation of the same species. The reason for the focus on the minke whale was only because that is the species that Japan’s whalers still wanted to ‘mine’ - sorry, ‘harvest’. Of course, it is inevitable that a few whales of other species such as fin, blue and sei whales will be seen during such dedicated surveys and a few scientists have tried to use those few sightings to estimate the numbers of those species, but such estimates still do not reveal rates of population increase – a very few of those have come from other, independent studies, such as they exist – but the focus and research effort, both in the field and concerning methodology has remained 95% on the minke whales. Notwithstanding those efforts there is still no agreement among the SC members so engaged, after thirty years of study, on how many minke whales feed in various sectors of the Antarctic, and huge discrepancies remain between different methods of data-processing What we do know is that the numbers appear to have decreased, but we do not know how or why.

A few years ago Australian scientists, with the support of their Government, launched a research coalition aimed at getting back to serious research on what is going on in the ocean ‘down there’. This year, in Jersey, a special project to study the dynamics of the blue whales in the Antarctic was kicked off – also by Australia. Meanwhile, in addition to the fuss about how many minke whales might be available for slaughter by Japanese gunners, the SC is deeply engaged in studies of how the Commission’s precautionary RMP - completed and approved a decade ago but never implemented – can now be ‘amended’ in such a way as to provide bigger immediate catches if and when regulated commercial whaling is resumed, even if that means – inevitably – an increased risk of accidental depletion of whales at some time during a prolonged management period. Norwegian scientists take the lead in that particular enterprise, because the minke whalers in their Arctic region would like to be allowed by their Government to kill more, even though they haven’t been able to sell all the meat from what they have been catching (Norway conducts minke whaling under its ‘objection’ to the zero catch limit that was enacted in 1985 - that is, before the moratorium came into force – because of the finding by the SC at that time, accepted by the Commission by a three-fourths majority vote that the minke population in the Northeast Atlantic was depleted.)

The Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition (ASOC) of NGOs, that I have been representing for a few years in IWC meetings, as an Observer, has repeatedly called for the IWC to make a comprehensive management plan for the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary designated in 1994. So far those pleas have been ignored by the Commission but the new Australian research initiatives might encourage interest in the idea. Personally I think it could be time for SC to set its sights a bit higher, to encompass research on and conservation of the baleen and sperm whales of the Southern Hemisphere when they are in their feeding grounds and on their breeding grounds.

The huge baleen whales were once, not so long ago – a century, a healthy whale’s lifetime - the biggest biological movers of nutrients (carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, iron and other essential trace elements) between the polar and the temperate and tropical ocean zones of the entire Southern Hemisphere. More about that next time.