Whaling

Introduction

Commercial whaling has decimated whale population after whale population. The development of new technology in the first part of the twentieth century, such as the introduction in 1925 of the first factory ship, enabled the whaling nations to hunt whales in the vast seas that surround Antarctica. The same pattern of destructive over-exploitation that characterizes all commercial whaling operations occurred in these Southern Oceans. It has been estimated that in the fifty years from 1925-1975 over 1.5 million whales were killed in total, the majority of these in Antarctic waters. Finally after decades of uncontrolled whaling and the resulting collapse of whale populations, the International Whaling Commission (IWC) agreed to an indefinite moratorium on commercial whaling which came into effect in 1986(Bass 117). Now, on the brink of the new millennium only one country is still killing whales in the Southern Ocean - Japan - and it does so in violation of international law. 

Antarctic whaling

Antarctic whaling peaked between the end of the Second World War and the mid-1960s when no less than 30,000 whales were killed each year. The whaling industry knew that whale stocks were being exterminated but attempts to regulate the slaughter ended in failure. Between the mid-1950s and late 1960s, world catches peaked at almost 70,000 whales per year. In the mid-1970s Antarctic whaling quotas were around 10,000 whales per season but only Japanese and former Soviet whalers were still operating in the region(Barstow 90). In 1985, the year before the International Whaling Commission (IWC) introduced an indefinite ban on all commercial whaling, Japanese and Soviet whalers in Antarctic waters slaughtered around 5,000 minke whales. Although Russia stopped commercial whaling in 1987, Japan has remained determined to continue. Hunting of whales for food, oil, or both. Whaling dates to prehistoric times, when Arctic peoples used stone tools to hunt whales. They used the entire animal, a feat not accomplished by Western commercial whalers until the advent of floating factories in the 20th century. The Basque were the first Europeans to hunt whales commercially; when seaworthy oceangoing vessels began to be made, they took to the open seas (14th - 16th century). They were followed by the Dutch and the Germans in the 17th century and the British and their colonists in the 18th century. In 1712 the first sperm whale was killed; its oil proved more valuable than that of the right whale, which had hitherto been the object of whaling ventures. Whaling expeditions in pursuit of the free-ranging sperm whale could last for four years. The discovery of petroleum (1859), overfishing, the use of vegetable oil, and the substitution of steel for whalebones in corsets led to a steep decline in whaling in the later 19th century, but Norwegian innovations made hunting the hitherto "wrong" whales (rorquals, including the blue whale and the sei whale; so called because they sank when killed) commercially feasible, and the number of whales killed rose from under 2,000 to over 20,000 between 1900 and 1911(Barstow 90). The Norwegians and the British dominated whaling into the mid 20th century, when overfishing again made it ...