Whales and Whaling: a Dance of Death

Extract

The whaling industry and its raw material, the whale stocks of the world, continue their grim Totentanz towards their mutual extinction. The most significant event of the 27th meeting of the International Whaling Commission in London in June, and one of the least publicised, was the Soviet announcement that next season they would have only two instead of three Antarctic expeditions. And, in fulfilment of the classic Parkinsonian theory, the IWC is about to get itself a full-time secretary and new offices in Cambridge just as the industry which provides its raison d'être has reached the brink of the precipice of its final decline. For the most significant event of all was one which was ignored at the meeting: the current experiments by Norway, West Germany, and other nations into the harvesting of krill. Since harvesting the top of the food chain is always the most uneconomic method of using natural resources, it may well be that in human terms it is more economic for men rather than whales to feed on krill. But there can be no doubt that a thoroughgoing effort to harvest krill would mean the virtual end of the whaling industry, by depriving the great baleen whales of their food. But this prospect did not seem sufficiently real to the IWC mandarins to warrant their discussing it—again a classic reaction to imminent extinction.