Whale hunting ban hypocritical

I don't like the idea of killing whales and I am always outraged when science is wrongly invoked to justify politics -- as Japanese does to justify the continual harvest of whales for essentially cultural reasons.

But I am just as appalled by the bullying and emotive approach taken at the recent International Whaling Commission (IWC) meeting in Ulsan by the Australian government.

The IWC was established in 1946 by whaling nations to facilitate the sustainable harvest of whales.

The International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling was negotiated and respected by countries including Norway that have been hunting and eaten whales for hundreds of years.

During the 1950s and 1960s numbers of whales continued to decline and countries like Norway reduced their whaling fleet.

When a moratorium was introduced by the IWC that essentially banned the commercial harvest of whales altogether in 1986, the Norwegians also respected this.  However, when the moratorium was not lifted despite agreement that numbers of Atlantic minke whales were on the increase, Norwegian whalers resumed commercial whaling anyway.

Norway remains the only nation to officially harvest whales commercially in defiance of the IWC moratorium.  Whales are harvested by Norwegians according to a quota system.  The 2005 season, from April 18, allows whalers 796 minke whales -- up from last year's 670.

Norway says minke whales, unlike protected giant blue or sperm whales, are not endangered because their numbers in the North Atlantic have risen above 100,000.

Norwegian whalers operate in accordance with a strict protocol that includes a system for killing whales that is deemed humane in so much as whales die instantly when struck by a harpoon tipped with a grenade.

In the led up to the recent IWC meeting, Australia's Environment Minister, Ian Campbell, travelled the world rallying against the slaughter of whales.  His catch cry included that it was morally wrong to kill such "giant and highly-intelligent creatures".

Many vegetarians, including members of the animal rights group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) claims it is morally wrong to slaughter and eat any animal -- including sheep.

Australians are essentially meat eaters.  We may not eat whale, but we eat pretty-much everything else.  Our government even condones the slaughter of dugongs for cultural reasons by indigenous Australians.  Dugongs, like whales, are marine mammals and numbers of dugongs are believed to be declining.

Given we are not vegetarians and given the extent to which the Norwegians regulate their harvest of whales, it seems rather hypocritical to me for our Environment Minister to be insisting on a total ban on whaling.

Indeed given the IWC was established to set quotas for the sustainable harvest of whales, and that this remains central to the IWC charter, it would seem that Australia, rather than Japan should have been censored at the recent IWC meeting.

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