From Today's New York Times

Save the Whales! Then What?
By ANDREW C. REVKIN

CAP DE BON DESIR, Quebec, Aug. 11—A few miles from this spit along the pink granite coast of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, there is a sheltered cove that has witnessed the full span of the human relationship with whales.

Nearly 500 years ago, fleets of Basque whalers, venturing ever farther from their home waters in Europe's Bay of Biscay, set up camp on the arc of gravelly beach. They had depleted domestic stocks of the right whale, a blubbery species that conveniently floats after it is killed, and found plenty of targets in the 900-foot-deep water just offshore.

They towed the harpooned giants into the shallows on the rising tide. When the water receded, they stripped fat from flesh, boiling it to extract precious lamp and cooking oil. The next high tide carried the carcasses back to sea.

Now the same cove is home to a different kind of fleet. Several times a day, fresh assortments of tourists slide into a dozen yellow and red kayaks and paddle away. Their quarry is also whales, but these visitors covet them alive, not dead. Small minkes and giant fin whales spout and feed amid ranks of puffing porpoises and seals.

But even as whales have faded as a resource and cemented their status as an environmental icon, with whale watching now a billion-dollar business, pressure is building to end the 18-year moratorium on commercial whaling.

A small group of countries, led by Japan, Norway and Iceland, says some stocks have recovered sufficiently that they can be both protected and eaten. They say the whales are essentially the marine equivalent of the majestic bison, which was slaughtered nearly to extinction, protected and now is being made into burgers.

It is hard to find a whale biologist who, in terms of numbers alone, disagrees with the contention that some whale stocks are, in theory, harvestable now.

Populations of whales like the 100-foot blue, the largest animal ever to inhabit the planet, remain profoundly depleted decades after intensive hunts ended. But experts say that for certain stocks of sperm, minke and other varieties, the 35-year-old slogan "Save the Whales" no longer applies. They are back.

A decade ago, the International Whaling Commission, created under a 1946 treaty to manage whale harvests, approved management plans with harvesting quotas for some of the more robust populations. A wide array of scientists advising the commission agreed the quotas would not endanger those species.

But most experts say there is a long way between a theoretically safe harvest limit and one that will work in practice. The commission remains divided on how to enact such a plan in a way that prevents cheating, with whaling and anti-whaling countries riven by passion, cultural differences and divergent interpretations of the same data.

Japan and its allies say the moratorium has been transformed by anti-whaling cultures from a strategy for restoring whales to harvestable numbers into an indefinite defense against whaling.

Last month, at the 56th annual meeting of the commission, in Sorrento, Italy, delegates approved a resolution calling for treaty parties to settle on a final management plan and a way to pay for it by their next meeting. Still, for many scientists and most environmental campaigners, there is a "wall of reluctance" to ending the moratorium, said Véronik de la Chenelière, a biologist at the Group for Research and Education on Marine Mammals in Tadoussac, a whale watching and research hub 12 miles west of this ancient whaling outpost.

Many experts still insist it is premature to resume big-scale hunts, given the lack of information on the dynamics of many whale populations and given how rife whaling has been in the past with false reporting and greed. The cultural and historic rifts over whales are even more intense than the scientific and regulatory debate.

Since 1971, when "Songs of the Humpback Whale" became a hit album and groups like Greenpeace were filming factory-scale whaling up close, western countries have grown to revere the animals as a sort of benevolent alien. The whale songs were even sent out of the solar system on the Voyager spacecraft.

But in countries like Japan, where the only meat in school lunches after World War II was fried whale and parboiled blubber, the right to go whaling has become an issue of national pride.

In Norway, which invented industrial-scale whaling a century ago, Halvard P. Johansen, the deputy director general of the fisheries ministry, said reverence for whales and revulsion to whaling could well be a result of the detachment of modern societies from the sources of other meats.

"I grew up on a small farm in the northern part of Norway," Mr. Johansen said. "In the spring we were playing with the lambs, which by any definition are cute animals, but nobody did mind eating them in the fall. That was, and still is, part of life."

Now, he said, "Most people see meat only wrapped in plastic."

Many biologists and activists, however, say whales are a special case.

"A lot of people would like to think of whales as philosopher-poets swimming around the oceans thinking deep thoughts, and that is not true," said Dr. Roger Payne, one of the biologists who first studied the mating songs of humpbacks. "But for some reason, people are deeply, deeply impressed by these animals. It may be their size, and grace has something to do with it. But there really is an air of mystery about them."

The human fascination with whales has led to a new counterweight to the pro-whaling forces—the hundreds of companies running whale-watching operations in 87 countries, including those seeking an end to the ban on commercial hunting.

Whale watching from boats began off San Diego in 1955, with the gray whales migrating offshore drawing 10,000 viewers in that first year. Nearly 50 years later, the activity draws nearly 10 million people annually.

Starting last year, the companies involved began showing up at the meetings of the whaling commission, trying to make the case that whales are worth more alive than dead, and that their use of live whales should have just as much consideration in managing populations as the killing of the animals for food or other products.

Even so, every year it is clearer that the 1986 moratorium will not prevent rising numbers of whales from being hunted and eaten. Growing numbers of scientists say the only way to see this resumed whaling happen in a controlled way is for anti-whaling countries and groups to concede that the blanket ban must be replaced by a stock-by-stock management plan.

Whaling has already been steadily increasing as pro-whaling countries have used clauses in the treaty, which critics call loopholes, to keep hunting.

Norway never stopped commercially hunting certain stocks of minke whales, exercising a right in the treaty to object to a moratorium. The country is planning to expand its harvest.

Japan and Iceland are now killing minkes and some other varieties in growing numbers under a treaty clause allowing lethal hunts for research, and allowing the resulting meat to be sold.

Critics say the research, which is not reviewed by peers, is a sham, although, as Japanese officials are quick to point out, the commission is using the resulting data.

Whaling countries want to expand their catches from hundreds a year to several thousand in all, mainly pursuing the minke, a small species, about the size and length of two Hummers, that is thought to number one million or two million worldwide.

Japan has recruited a lengthening list of small island nations, many without whaling traditions, to join the commission. Many end up receiving development assistance from Japan. Almost all the newcomers have sided with it on votes, although Japanese officials say there is no quid pro quo.

The total count of commission members is 57 countries, and the number of pro-whaling votes has gone to 21 in 2003, from 9 in 2000, according to environmental groups.

At the July meeting, Japan threatened to pull out of the commission altogether in 2006 if it did not enact the new management plan and end the moratorium.

During the meeting, Yoshimasa Hayashi, a member of Japanese Parliament from the ruling party, crystallized the Japanese position in an interview with the BBC. "In Japan we have pet dogs," he said. "But we don't tell the Koreans to stop eating dogs. Nor should people tell us to stop eating whales."

Environmental and animal welfare groups, facing the rise in whale numbers, the expanding hunt in the name of research and erosion of the whaling commission's support for the moratorium, have split into two camps.

Some agree that commercial whaling is possible to consider now but only with ironclad tracking and enforcement methods that some whaling countries oppose.

Richard Mott, vice president for international policy of the World Wildlife Fund, said whales are more akin to elephants or mahogany than to fish or other marine resources—slow to reproduce, extremely valuable and harvested by anyone with access to the species habitat. A shutdown of a global market can help restore such stocks, he said, but added that when markets in these kinds of commodities are reinstituted, history tends to repeat itself.

Animal welfare groups argue that any whaling, managed or not, is inherently cruel. They say it is impossible to hunt semi-submerged mammals by shooting explosive harpoons from heaving ship decks without causing some to die slow, agonizing deaths.

Pro-whaling countries and their supporters attack both sets of critics, saying proposed hunting levels are so conservative that stocks could not be depleted again. They say the unbridled hunts of old, conducted by powerful countries seeking valuable oils, would never be repeated by a few countries seeking a source of meat.

They add that the hunting methods are far more lethal and humane than most of the big-game hunting that takes place in many anti-whaling countries. Japanese officials contend that, overall, wild-killed whales have a far better life, and death, than most livestock or poultry.

Rollie Schmitten, the top American government official on the whaling commission, said there has been "more progress in the last year than the last 10 years" on ways to prevent illegal harvests. He said Japan and the other pro-whaling nations have agreed to a plan for putting independent observers on whaling vessels and are close to agreeing on a system for using DNA tests of whale meat in markets to make sure it came from animals killed by the rules.

Other technological innovations can help, he and other experts said. Ships can be equipped with position-indicating beacons that reveal if they are straying from permitted waters, just as a felon on probation can be monitored with an ankle bracelet.

Still, Mr. Schmitten said, big hurdles remain to ending the moratorium. In return, he said, loopholes in the treaty, like the lack of restrictions on whaling that is labeled scientific research, must be eliminated.

Many whale biologists, while agreeing that some stocks of some species are thriving, still oppose an end to the moratorium, saying the history of whaling contains too many incidents of unrecorded kills, falsely labeled meat and questionable science.

"A few years ago, I would have said I don't see the problem, but now I see reason for being cautious," Ms. de la Chenelière in Quebec said. "There is a lot of pressure that rises when something becomes a big industry. We've seen it again and again with fish stocks. Human beings have historically shown they can't follow rules and stick to what is reasonable."

In the end, it is still perceptions that most deeply divide those in the whaling debate.

Off the coast near Cap de Bon Desir, whale watchers from Paris and Toulouse, France, marveled as several fin whales surfaced, each nearly three times the length of a kayak.

Each animal spouted explosively five or six times, like some hybrid of submarine and steam engine, before diving to feed. A cheer echoed over the sea.

In a new book promoting the Japanese point of view on whales, published by The Japan Times, a section on the "tastiest of all whales" describes the gustatory merits and drawbacks of various species.

The tastiest? The fin.