Spectator's Journal / Save the Whalers
Price, David Andrew
Save the Whalers by David Andrew Price 0 ne morning last January, Arvid Enghaugen, a resident of the Norwegian coastal town of Gressvik, found his whaling boat sitting unusually deep in the water....
...For the next two weeks, Enghaugen and crew were David Andrew Price is a writer in Washington and an attorney with the Washington Legal Foundation...
...A group again tried to board the whaler, and the crew again threw them off...
...As it turns out, minke whales are no more in danger of extinction than Angus cattle...
...When he climbed aboard to investigate, he found that the ship was in fact sinking...
...The mainstay of the case against whaling—that it threatens an endangered species—is characteristic of the misinformation...
...After breaking the lock, Enghaugen discovered that the engine was underwater...
...Herman says he has seen no evidence that the natural vocalizations of dolphins constitute a language...
...Enghaugen's crew tossed one protester into the sea, and the rest then jumped overboard...
...T he only whale species that Enghaugen and his fellow Norwegian whalers hunt is the minke, which Norwegians eat as whale steaks, whale meatballs, and whaleburgers...
...In 1994, thirty-two Norwegian boats killed a total of 279 minkes, out of an estimated local population of about 87,000 and a world population of around 900,000...
...In 1982 the IWC voted to suspend commercial whaling for a five-year period starting in 1986...
...To protest the commission's disregard of the facts about whale stocks, the British chairman of the IWC's scientific committee resigned that year, pointing out in his angry letter of resignation that the commission's actions "were nothing to do with science...
...It is true that European nations and the United States killed enormous numbers of whales during commercial whaling's heyday in the nineteenth century, but to say that "whales" are endangered is no more meaningful than to say that "birds" are endangered...
...Louis Herman, director of the University of Hawaii's marine mammal laboratory and an opponent of whaling, has been studying the behavior of captive dolphins since 1967 and of whales in the wild since 1976...
...Enghaugen cut a hole in one of the Greenpeace dinghies with a whale flensing knife...
...The late David and Melba Caldwell, who studied dolphin behavior at the University of Florida, maintained flatly that "dolphins do not talk...
...Whaling nations soon learned, though, that the majority of nations in the IWC—including the United States—intended to maintain the ban indefinitely, no matter what the numbers showed...
...The ostensible purpose was to permit the collection of better data on whales before hunting resumed...
...His conclusions about the animals' mental skills were based partly on his observations of captive dolphins at his lab in the Virgin Islands, but mainly on wild flights of conjecture...
...For in the eyes of whalekind, there is little difference between the behavior of the monsters of the Reich and the monsters behind the harpoon...
...C etacean behavior researchers have rejected Lilly's claims...
...Norway lodged a reservation exempting itself from the moratorium, as the IWC treaty permitted, but it complied voluntarily...
...Some are endangered, some are not...
...He also found a calling card from the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, a small, California-based environmentalist group that specializes in direct actions against whalers...
...Canada left the IWC in 1982, and Iceland left in 1992...
...Part of the credit must go to the animals themselves, which are more charismatic on television than Kurds, Bosnians, or Rwandans, who have engendered far less international protection...
...someone had opened its sea cock and padlocked the engine-room door...
...And the idea that whales have something like a human language is, at present, pure folklore...
...Like virtually all animals, whales make vocalizations, but there is no evidence that they are uttering Whalish words and sentences...
...The movement owes most of its success, however, to the gullibility of Hollywood and the press in passing along bogus claims from whaling's opponents...
...There have been abuses...
...In their view,"dolphins probably are just exceptionally amiable mammals with an intelligence now considered by most workers, on a subjective basis, to be comparable to that of a better-than-average dog...
...The ban on whaling is no longer about conservation, in other words, but about the desire of many Americans and Western Europeans to impose their feelings about whales upon the whaling nations (which include Iceland, Russia, Japan, and the Inuits of Canada and Alaska...
...Their famed "singing" is done only by the males, and then during but half the year—a pattern more suggestive of bird-song than human speech...
...And for whales...
...and other nations have adopted a worldwide moratorium on whaling...
...A 1993 report by the Congressional Research Service observed that the data on whales undercut the conservationist argument, and that "if the United States 48 The American Spectator February 1995 argues for continuing the moratorium on commercial whaling, it may have to rely increasingly on moral and ethical appeals...
...Much of the popular mythology about cetacean intelligence comes from crank scientist John Lilly, a physician who became convinced in the 1950s that whales and dolphins are not only smarter and more communicative than humans, but also have their own civilizations, complete with philosophy, history, and science that are passed down orally through the generations...
...dogged by Greenpeace ships and helicopters...
...Whales possess large brains, but that proves nothing about their mental agility...
...The blue whale, the gray whale, and the humpback were indeed depleted, but those species were later protected by international agreement long before the existence of Greenpeace or Sea Shepherd...
...the protesters were picked up by the dinghy and returned to the Greenpeace mother ship...
...The IWC continued the moratorium anyway at its next meeting...
...p opular notions of whales' humanlike intelligence, often cited by opponents of whaling, have little real support...
...A week later, after Enghaugen's boat shot a harpoon into a whale, a team from another Greenpeace vessel cut the harpoon line to free the wounded animal...
...The anthropomorphization of the whale reached new heights with a 1993 open letter to the Norwegian people from Sea Shepherd president Paul Watson, who predicted, "The whales will talk about you in the same vein as Jews now talk of Nazis...
...Lilly also predicted in the late seventies that the State Department would eventually negotiate treaties with the cetaceans, and that humanity's progress in its dealings with them would lead the Galactic Coincidence Control Center to send agents to planet Earth to open the way for extraterrestrial contacts with us...
...Norway terminated its voluntary compliance in 1993...
...The whale-savers have succeeded in shaping policy by selling the idea that whales are different: that they are endangered underwater Einsteins...
...Dolphin investigator Kenneth Norris of the University of California Santa Cruz, who was among the first to study dolphins in the wild and is responsible for much of our knowledge about dolphin sonar, writes that they have "a complicated animal communication system, yes, but for an abstract syntactic language like ours, no compelling evidence seemed, or seems, to exist...
...Counting Enghaugen's boat, Sea Shepherd has sunk or damaged eleven Norwegian, Icelandic, Spanish, and Portuguese vessels since 1979...
...Alexei V. Yablokov, special adviser to the president of Russia for ecology and health, has revealed that the whaling fleet of the former Soviet Union illegally killed more than 700 protected right whales during the 1960s, but the International Whaling Commission'sinstitution of an observer program in 1972 essentially put an end to the Soviet fleet's illegal activities...
...That's why Icelandic filmmaker Magnus Gudmundsson, who has produced a documentary showing Greenpeace's machinations on the issue, is correct in calling the movement "a massive industry of deception...
...Whales can be trained to perform stunts and other tasks, but so can pigeons and many other animals that have never been credited with the cerebral powers of homo sapiens...
...There's no reason to think the situation would be different with other cetacean species," he answers...
...Although the activists failed to stop Enghaugen's hunt, their public relations war in America has been a different story...
...there are more than seventy species of whales, and their numbers vary dramatically...
...Over the past twenty years, the save-the-whales movement has been so successful in shaping public sentiment about the whaling industry that the U.S...
...The boat was repaired in time for the 1994 whaling season, but Enghaugen's problems weren't over...
...On July 1, while he was looking for whales off the Danish coast, five Greenpeace protesters boarded the ship from an inflatable dinghy and tried to take its harpoon cannon...
...Margaret Klinowska, a Cambridge University expert on cetacean intelligence, holds that the structure of the whale brain has more in common with that of comparatively primitive mammals such as hedgehogs and bats than with the brains of primates...
...0 The American Spectator February 1995 49...
...What American policy on whaling enforces is simply a cultural preference—one comparable to our distaste for horse-meat, which is favored in France...
Vol. 28 • February 1995 • No. 2
