The End of Whaling?
It was news most campaigners had only dreamt of: last month, Svandis Svavarsdottir, Icelandic Minister of Food, Agriculture and Fisheries announced that a halt to the hunting of fin whales in Iceland, at least until August 31. Key to her decision was a report, by the Icelandic Food and Veterinary Association (MAST), showing that the methods used to hunt the large fin whales did not comply with the Act on Animal Welfare; that they were, in effect, cruel.
While the findings were no surprise to those who already abhored the practice - and while the suspension is ostensibly to find out whether it’s actually possible to kill whales ‘ethically’ - activists have been buoyed by Svavarsdottir’s boundary-nudging statement: “The conditions of the Act on Animal Welfare are inescapable in my mind. If the government and licence holders cannot guarantee welfare requirements, this activity does not have a future.” [1]
Relief amongst campaigners against whaling in Iceland has been palpable; just days before Svavarsdottir’s announcement, harpoons were being fixed to whaling ships belonging to Hvalur, Iceland’s last whaling company. But the deadline still looms. Campaign group The Last Whaling Station posted: “As we celebrate the life of these 150 to 170 whales who now will live, it is important we remember that, after August 31st, this decision might be reconsidered. So let’s keep educating ourselves … and spread awareness so we can put a full stop to this unnecessary, inhumane act. It is our responsibility. At this point, not knowing is a choice.” Nine-year-old activist and podcast host Leo tweeted: “Let’s keep the pressure to get [whaling] banned permanently there and everywhere - whales are our biggest friend, to save our oceans, planet and our future. It’s criminal [that] we still hunt them! 2023, bro.“
‘Criminal’ feels appropriate. Whales are still, broadly, protected under a global moratorium on commercial whaling, set in place in 1986 by the International Whaling Commission, so its practice - in the face of rising extinction rates and ecological breakdown - feels both anachronistic and bizarre. Iceland is an oddity. Despite its membership of the IWC, the country began setting quotas for whale hunts in its waters in 2006 and is now one of only three countries, including Norway and Japan who continue to hunt commercially. Activities stopped for three years over the pandemic but started again last year. Old habits are hard to break.
Nonetheless, given the global landscape for whales, Norway is still a ‘soft’ target for anti-whalers - primarily because its hunts are driven by one company, Hvalur, owned by the 80-year-old Kristján Loftsson. Known as Iceland’s last whaling magnate, Loftsson began whaling when he was 13 and has bullishly kept going despite growing outrage, international scrutiny and opposition and expanded whale sanctuary zones [2] His approach is chillingly prosaic: “If a stock doesn't sustain the operation, we would not be whaling. If the stock sustains the operation, we whale. That's it. It's just a business like anything else,” he told National Geographic [8]. Appeals to compassion for such obviously intelligent life fall flat. “Whales are just another fish,” he reportedly told a journalist in 2010. “If they are so intelligent, why don’t they stay outside of Iceland’s territorial waters?”
But the MAST report was stark and it was uncompromising. Released on May 8, the study reported that only 59% of fin whales killed during the hunts in Iceland last year died instantly. Almost 40 % struggled for an average of 11.5 minutes before they died. Two killings took over an hour with one kill lasting as long as two hours, according to an eyewitness account by reporter Sunna Ósk Logadóttir. A quarter of the fin whales had to be harpooned a second time. Of the 36 whales shot more than once, five whales were shot three times and four whales were shot four times. Reloading the gun takes six to eight minutes. “You realise how long this animal suffered and fought for its life,” tourist turned campaigner Arne Feuerhahn told The National Geographic. “With the four harpoons, that was just pure, pure torture.” [9]
The deaths of 56 out of the 148 killed were filmed and analysed - and if the figures are harrowing, eye-witness accounts such as Logadottir’s are more so. “On September 20th last year (2022), Hvalur 8, one of Hvalur hf‘s whaling ships was hunting in the evening. They sailed out to Selvogsbanki, south of Reykjanesskaga and around 7:30 p.m. they have another female whale in sight,” she wrote. “She is not traveling alone as two whales are swimming together. The one swimming closer to the ship comes up to blow. It breathes and it is at this moment that the shot is fired. A loud bang sounds. The explosive harpoon used for hunting strikes the animal in the abdomen. But the shot does not cause death. Five more harpoons, two of which miss, are to be fired at this almost 20 meter long female fin whale over a two-hour period, before the end.
It is worth lingering with this female till her end. “Between the first shot and the last, she has to surface many times, swimming and blowing vigorously. Around 20.30 it starts to get dark. The sea is dark blue and the crew of Hvalur 8 has lit a strong searchlight on the deck. They follow the fin whale with the light. She blows and she's bleeding. Sometimes, it's as if the person controlling the light loses sight of her. Because she dives regularly. Sometimes quite a long time at a time. The sky on the horizon is pale pink. It will change colors, become purple, dark blue and finally black when the goal is achieved: To kill this whale.
“She stretches the rope that is attached to the gun which is supposed to ensure that the shot animal does not swim out to sea injured. She is still swimming. Comes up and blows. Blood gushes from her. Before the end, the female fin whale had been shot with four explosive harpoons. When the time is about twenty minutes to nine, it is pitch black and another shot is fired. The harpoon whips through the air and hits the whale, just in front of the pectoral fin joint. The bloodstain is noticeable in the light of the searchlight of the ship. She is still fighting. With two ropes stuck in it from two harpoons in the body. The crew loads the gun once more. The gunner still follows the animal that blows, swims and dives.
“It is not easy to aim in these conditions. No difference can be seen between the sky and the sea anymore. Everything is black. Except around the fin whale. She can be heard blowing, then blows up blood, and then a third shot is fired that hits her. She disappears for a while. But then she comes back up and blows. Quite bravely. A little later, the fourth shot is fired with a loud bang. It is well past ten in the evening. This is the shot that kills her.” [3] The whale‘s death struggle lasted 120 minutes and, no matter how inured one may be to photographs of whale carcasses, dissected and bloodied, ‘flensed’ and lying flatly on dry docks, the testimony feels both literally and figuratively like a knife in the gut.
Pregnant female shot in the stomach in Iceland. Picture:
Public outcry was heartfelt. After viewing the clip, Inga Sæland, the chairperson of the People's Party, broke down in tears and walked out. “Whatever their views on whaling, both Icelanders and the international community will be horrified by these findings,” Patrick Ramage, the senior director at the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), told The Guardian at the time of the report’s release. “No animal – however it is killed – should suffer for such a long time. Whales are sentient, intelligent and complex creatures that suffer both physically and psychologically during this traumatic massacre.” Árni Finnsson, the chair of the Iceland Nature Conservation Association, said: “This killing is inhumane; it has to stop. There is no economic benefit for Iceland and it undermines the country’s record as a pro-conservation nation.” [4]
Danny Groves, a spokesperson for Whale and Dolphin Conservation, added: “We’ve known for a long time that time to death in these hunts can take 20 to 25 minutes. It will be an agonising death because these are sentient beings. They will experience great pain. You’re using a grenade-tipped harpoon from a moving ship to a moving target. This wouldn’t be allowed in a slaughterhouse in the UK.” The head of MAST Hrönn Ólína Jörundsdóttir, called the killings “unacceptable”.
“The conversation changed significantly here because of the MAST report, the video that is circulating and all the media coverage,” agrees American documentary filmmaker and journalist Micah Garen, who runs The Last Whaling Station with artist, activist, filmmaker and writer Anahita Babaei. The pair have spent the last year in Iceland raising awareness, developing partnerships and staging cultural interventions, including a concert with singer Bjork. “There is a strong feeling that whaling hunting is inhumane and needs to stop. Almost two-thirds of Icelanders believe that whaling harms Iceland's reputation.” [5]
Fin whales, named for the hooked dorsal fins found near their tails, are the second largest whale on earth, growing up to 85 feet (26 m) long and 160,000 pounds (72.3 metric tons) and living, when left alone, for about 90 years. Streamlined and elegant, they are also the fastest of all the great whales, capable of swimming up to 23 miles per hour, but their speed is no match for the advent of tech-powered killing and the cruellest of weapons, the explosive harpoon. In 2018, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which last assessed fin whales in 2018, listed them as ‘vulnerable’, largely because of commercial whaling.
Whales’ value to the ocean environment and to climate change has become a key lever in recent campaigns to save them. Whales play hitherto unrecognised roles in sequestering carbon; one whale can store the carbon equivalent of thousands of trees. They are also vital in balancing ocean habitats. Whales feed in the deep ocean, then return to the surface to breathe and poo. Their iron-rich faeces creates the perfect growing conditions for phytoplankton, which are in turn crucial to Earth’s atmosphere, capturing an estimated 40% of all CO2 produced – four times the amount captured by the Amazon rainforest. [4] “It cannot be overstated,” said Captain Lockhart Maclean, operations director of The Captain Paul Watson Foundation [6], “how important the protection of whales and dolphins throughout their migratory ranges is for the health of our planet and for the hope of humankind to slow species loss and extinction and turn the tide on the Anthropocene era. Their benefit to ocean ecosystems and biodiversity far outweighs the limited and subsidized economic activity generated in Iceland.” The most recent estimate of fin whales in the Iceland region is about 30,000. That was in 2007; one can only imagine the numbers now.
But science - in the form of statistics and quotas - has failed the whale before. For most campaigners, it is the animals themselves that drives them. Watching a gathering of fin whales, filmed for National Geographic, one wonders how hunters such as Loftsson have the gall to slaughter such majesty [7]. The animals move as if in slow motion, gently churning the waters around them as they feed; their secret languages guiding them around each other as fluidly as dancers. One turns in the water, to show the huge accordion-like throat that can gulp up to 4,000 pounds (1.8 metric tons) of food a day when wide open. As the whales breathe out through their blowholes, rainbows appear faintly in the mist around them. “It’s hard to comprehend that we slaughtered 750,000 fin whales, taking the species to the brink of extinction,” says presenter British wildlife filmmaker Bertie Gregory over the footage. “Knowing that makes this spectacle even more powerful.”
In her 2020 New Yorker article What Have We Done to the Whale, Oxford philosopher Amia Srinivasan wrote: “To be close to a whale, in the wild, not in a boat but in the water itself, is to encounter an embodied agency that exists, across every dimension, on a scale that swallows our own: its physical size, its evolutionary age, its polar voyages.” [8]. But few put it better than activist and former founder of marine conservation organization Sea Shepherd Captain Paul Watson when he describes the moment he fell, passionately, irrevocably, in love. While looking into the eye of a dying whale. “I saw something else in that eye - it was pity. And not for himself, but for us. That we could take life so thoughtlessly, so mercilessly… And for what?” [9]
For what indeed? For Japan, apparently, where Loftsson sends about 90 per cent of what he takes out of the sea but where - even there - the appetite for whale flesh is falling. International trade data show that each year from 2018 through 2020, Iceland shipped more than 2.5 million pounds of whale meat to Japan, which left the IWC in 2018. [2] Meanwhile, Captain Watson, eponymous head of The Captain Paul Watson Foundation UK, will be sailing to Iceland at the end of August, when Loftsson’s licence may be renewed, in a repurposed Scottish Fisheries Protection vessel, the John Paul DeJoria II. He has one agenda: to defend life in the sea through techniques of “aggressive non-violence”, putting itself in harm’s way to prevent whale deaths. Having split from Sea Shepherd in order to pursue direct action, Mr Watson has said that he and his team of volunteers will "harass, block and do absolutely everything to prevent ‘illegal fishing,’ and that the operations will "oppose criminal operations, not legitimate companies". [6] May he succeed.
Torshavn, The Faroes: 78 long finned pilot whales, plus 5 uncounted foetuses on July 9, 2023. Picture: The Captain Paul Watson Foundation.
Beyond Icelandic waters, the world is still grim for whales - as it is for all species on this planet,. “Whales consume much of the eight million metric tons of plastic that enter the oceans each year,” wrote Srinivasan, citing the body of a sperm whale that washed up on the Spanish coast with an entire greenhouse in its belly, including tarps, hosepipes, ropes, flowerpots, and a spray canister it had contained. “Since the 1970s, with the loss of ice-fixed algae, Antarctic krill populations have declined by between seventy and eighty per cent. Noise from industrial shipping — eighty per cent of the world’s merchandise is transported on cargo vessels — has shrunk the whale’s world: the distance over which a whale’s vocalizations can travel is just one-tenth of what it was sixty years ago. Whales have washed up on the Peloponnesian coast with ears bleeding from decompression injuries caused by anti-submarine-warfare training.” [8]
Then there are the frighteningly unpredictable transformations to their ocean homes as climate breakdown tightens its grip. Ecologists have warned that the dramatic shifts associated with unstable weather patterns could subject even relatively large whale populations to sudden extinction. Ocean temperatures are ‘off the charts’, Prof Matthew England, a climate scientist at the University of New South Wales told the Guardian [10] and, where water warms, oxygen levels diminish and plankton blooms: fish are literally dying of suffocation in oceans and rivers [11]. Across the natural world, scientists are seeing more and more ‘mass die-offs’ or mass mortality events. “Their scale — that of carnage — seems to speak to our modern ecological anxiety, rage, and grief; mass mortality events are material evidence of anthropogenic apocalypse, an unignorable and immediate tally of the ravages we’ve sown,” wrote journalist Marion Renault [12]. The whales, all whales, will be affected.
As if this wasn’t enough, those remaining face the barbarity of deliberate human slaughter - as an example, in the Faroes Islands, where Captain Paul Watson currently patrols. The name of this collection of 18 islands between Iceland and Norway is now synonymous with the phonetically appropriate Grind or Grindadrap, the traditional systematic hunting of sea mammals. In 2021, the hunt left the world aghast by killing 1,400 white-sided dolphins in a single day. Even the chairman of the Faroese Whalers Association, Olavur Sjurdarberg, was taken aback. "It was a big mistake," he told the BBC at the time. "When the pod was found, they estimated it to be only 200 dolphins.” Only when the killing process started did they find out the true size of the pod, he said. "Somebody should have known better," he said. "Most people are in shock about what happened." [13]
Nonetheless, the hunt still enjoys support amongst locals, who say that the animals have fed the local population for centuries and who accuse media and foreign NGOs of disrespecting local culture and traditions. Since the grind resumed this May, over a thousand pilot whales have been killed, with efforts by environmentalists stymied by Danish navy vessels. [14] But the Icelandic ban has given campaigners hope. Some are even looking at its impacts farther afield. “All eyes now on Norway and Japan,” messaged marine biologist Dr Tom Montgomery on social media. “How can they continue this barbaric industry in the light of the proven extreme suffering and environmental harm?”
The Last Whaling Station’s vigorous work with Icelandic partners has been crucial to the ban. “This remarkable accomplishment stands as a resounding testament to the transformative potential of activism, reminding us of the true power that individuals possess to shape the course of society,” says Babaei. “When a nation's narrative undergoes a profound shift, deeply entrenched practices begin to yield to a new collective consciousness. In the case of Iceland, the decision by the Ministry to prioritize animal welfare marks a significant stride towards positioning the nation as a beacon of progress in championing both the rights of animals and the safeguarding of biodiversity."
“It was such a momentous decision from Svandis to put a temporary halt to whaling until the end of August,” agrees Garen. “But we don’t know what will happen in September, so the effort continues. Then there is the renewal of the whaling license at the end of the year, and a need to pass legislation in Parliament to ban whaling. The fight is far from over, but we are here for it.”
Ragnar Tomas, ‘No Whaling This Summer’, Iceland Review, June 20 2023, https://www.icelandreview.com/news/no-whaling-this-summer-minister-halts-fin-whale-hunting/
Rachel Fobar, ‘One of the World’s Last Whalers inflicts more Suffering than thought’, National Geographic, October 31 2022. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/has-iceland-had-its-last-whaling-season
Source arcticle on heimildin.is : https://bit.ly/41xZQ5V and the full translated text at: https://bit.ly/3Mm5V0M
Karen McVeigh, Whales Take Up to Two Hours to Die after Being Harpooned, Icelandic Report Finds,’ Guardian, May 8 2023 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/may/08/whales-take-up-to-two-hours-to-die-after-being-harpooned-icelandic-report-finds
‘As fin whale hunt in Iceland resumes, national support for whaling continues to decline,’ IFAW, June 16 2022. https://www.ifaw.org/press-releases/decline-support-fin-whaling-iceland
Vicky Allan, ‘The ex-Scottish Fisheries Boat about to Fight Icelandic Whaling’, May 13 2023, https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/23517089.ex-scottish-fisheries-boat-fight-icelandic-whaling/
National Geographic, ‘The Largest Gathering of Gigantic Fin Whales EVER FILMED | Epic Adventures with Bertie Gregory’, August 31 2022, https://youtu.be/C9J6_HkN9S8
Anita Srivasan, ‘What have we done to the Whale?,’ New Yorker Magazine, August 17, 2020 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/08/24/what-have-we-done-to-the-whale
https://twitter.com/CaptPaulWatson/status/1648483189734928388?s=20
Graham ReadFearn, ‘Headed Off the Charts: World’s Ocean Surface Temperature Hits Record High,’ Guardian, April 8 2023 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/apr/08/headed-off-the-charts-worlds-ocean-surface-temperature-hits-record-high
Pete McKenzie, ‘Fish Are Dying of Suffocation in Oceans and Rivers’, National Geographic, July 12 2023, ‘https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/fish-kills-explained?loggedin=true&rnd=1689416261803
Marion Renault, ‘Animals are Dying in Droves. What are they telling us,’ New Republic, May 3 2023, https://newrepublic.com/article/172221/animals-dying-sea-lions
Joshua Nevett, ‘Faroe Islands: Anger over killing of 1,400 dolphins in one day’, BBC, September 14 2021, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-58555694
Agence France-Presse in Copenhagen, ‘Over 500 dolphins killed in Faroe Islands since hunt resumed in May’, Guardian, June 15 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/15/dolphins-killed-faroe-islands-hunt-resumed-may
