Whales 1, Japan 0

Posted on June 16, 2006

In a last-minute surprise victory for anti-whaling nations such as Australia and the United States, Japan failed in its attempt to gain a majority of pro-whaling seats on the International Whaling Commission. The Commission is meeting in St. Kitts and Nevis.

Japan suffered an unexpected and total defeat when it tried to start attacking a 20-year-old ban on commercial whaling at the International Whaling Commission's meeting in the Caribbean state of St Kitts and Nevis last night. The member countries of the UN whaling treaty voted down two proposals by Japan - the most significant one for secret ballots so that small Pacific and Caribbean nations that receive Japanese aid could unpick the protection of whales without fear of retribution.
The other proposal sought to prevent the commission from discussing the fate of dolphins and porpoises as well as whales. Ian Campbell, Australia's environment minister and a leader of the anti-whaling bloc, said: "The great victory is that we have raised the levels of understanding of this issue to levels that have probably not been seen since the 1970s. "Tens of thousands of whales have been saved because of the moratorium that is under threat." Conservationists and anti-whaling countries had predicted that the Japanese were likely to win a narrow overall majority of pro-whaling nations at this year's meeting.
However, quiet lobbying by anti-whaling countries led by Australia, Britain, New Zealand and South Africa, and environmental groups, appeared to have seen off the threat, though only by the narrowest of margins. Earlier, in the first vote of the five-day talks, anti-whaling nations managed to hold on to a majority in a vote about whether to drop an item about the conservation of small whale, porpoise and dolphin species from the agenda. The vote was won by 32 votes to 30, with one known pro-whaling nation, Senegal, absent and Denmark abstaining. Japan had opened the conference with a demand for the resumption of commercial whaling. Japan and other whaling nations such as Norway and Iceland almost got a simple majority at the annual IWC meeting a year ago in South Korea, but some allies failed to pay their dues and could not vote and others did not turn up. It is unclear as yet who let them down this time.
Sarah Duthie, of Greenpeace, said: "Whaling history may not have been rewritten this year but it was too close for comfort. The anti-whaling countries must see this as a wake-up call and add action to their rhetoric. "Greenpeace will once again challenge the whalers on the high seas; the question is, what are the anti-whaling countries prepared to do?"

It was a close call and it's not over yet. It's time for countries like England, the U.S. and Australia to stand up to the Japan and its absolutely revolting stance on the murder of this important, endangered species. To slaughter whales for use in dog food and Japanese fast food restaurants is the height of barbarism and reckless endangerment of the ecosystem.

As Carl Sagan pointed out in his groundbreaking series Cosmos:

"A typical whale song lasts for perhaps fifteen minutes; the longest, about an hour. Often it is repeated, identically, beat for beat, measure for measure, note for note. Occasionally, a group of whales will leave their winter waters in the midst of a song and six months later return to continue at precisely the right note, as if there had been no interruption. Very often the members of the group will sing the same song together. By some mutual consensus, some collaborative songwriting, the piece changes month by month, slowly and predictably. These vocalizations are complex. If the songs of the humpback whale are enunciated as a tonal language, the total information content, the number of bits of information in such songs, is some 10 to the power of 6 bits, about the same as the information content of The Iliad or The Odyssey."

Is our legacy as humans to be the destruction of these magnificent creatures whose complex songs were once heard all the way around the world's oceans?