Today it may seem counterintuitive that the international organization protecting existing whale species is called the International Whaling Commission (IWC), which literally means “International Whaling Commission”. But when this body was formed in 1946, its purpose was to regulate the commercial hunting of whales and set quotas for animals that each member country could kill. Technically, this is still the case, except that the quotas have been zero for each country since 1986. In fact, in the 20th century, hunting almost led to the extinction of most whale species, and for this reason the IWC approved a hunting moratorium on July 23, 1982, which continues to this day.
For centuries, the hunt for whales provided mankind with important raw materials: for the societies that lived and practiced in the coastal areas, above all meat; for the others, chiefly whale oil, which was extracted from the abundant fat reserves of whales and was used both as food and as fuel for lamps before oil and its derivatives were used. Whale bones were also used for various purposes, such as making busts worn by women.
More or less until the second half of the 19th century, hunting was practiced with harpoons and rowing or sailing boats, making this activity risky and not always effective. Because of this, although demand for whale oil increased and hunters proliferated, the number of whales killed each year was relatively limited, allowing populations to reproduce in a reasonable amount of time and continue to survive.
Towards the end of the century things changed in a paradoxical way. At the same time that this oil was being exploited in place of whale oil for lamps and natural gas to light the streets at night, whaling increased and became an industry. In fact, oil enabled it to be practiced on faster motor ships. In addition, species that previously could not be hunted because they were too fast for sailboats, such as blue whales, the world’s largest animals, became endangered. About 90 percent of them were killed within a few decades.
During the same period, the development of industry allowed new uses for the different parts of the whales’ bodies: they were used to produce fertilizers, lubricants, explosives, food for dogs and cats (but also for mink, which were farmed for their fur), flavorings for industrial soups and even margarine.
So, as the American biologist Carl Safina, an expert on animal behavior, reports in his essay Non-human animals, it is estimated that around 300,000 sperm whales were killed in two centuries between the 18th and 19th centuries: in just 60 years at the turn of the 19th This number was reached in the 20th century and only doubled in the 1960s. Certain whale species have been more affected by industrial hunting than others, and in certain areas of the ocean some have become extinct and are still not found.
In 1946, as the impact of unlimited hunting had become apparent to whalers as well, countries that hunted whales rallied at the IWC to save the hunt “from the impending extinction of whales from hunting,” Safina explains. :
This vicious circle condemned the Commission to paralysis. Mediocre bureaucrats sent to the meetings by interested nations juggled staged farces to “estimate” how many killings they would agree to. They all competed for a part of a total share; Therefore, a large total quota meant winning larger portions.
For this reason, for many years the IWC limited itself to advocating increases in the number of whales killed each year, rather than regulating them. In addition, the quotas were calculated very arbitrarily, without taking into account the reproduction rate of the different species and how many animals were still circulating at any one time. At the same time, the numbers of animals hunted were constantly being revised downwards by the whalers, so that in reality many more were killed than reported.
If that then changed, it was also thanks to the different perspectives on whales that spread worldwide from the post-war period. For centuries, these beasts were viewed primarily as monsters – think of the myth of the Leviathan or Herman Melville’s famous novel Moby Dick about the hunt for sperm whales – or at best as competitors in fishing, particularly dolphins. However, scientific studies of their life, behavior, and intelligence changed people’s opinions about these animals.
There was one record in particular that had a huge impact.
In the 1960s, the American biologist Roger Payne discovered that during the mating season, humpback whales communicate using very complex and fascinating “songs” that allow them to keep in touch thousands of kilometers away from their own kind. Payne recorded these songs and introduced them to the world in 1970 with the 1970 record Songs of the Humpback Whale (literally “The Songs of the Humpback Whale”), which sold more than 100,000 copies, a natural sound recording disc. It is said to have played an important role in persuading the United States to end whaling in 1972 and proposing a global moratorium to the IWC that same year. The efforts of many environmental organizations such as Greenpeace, whose activists approached the whalers to document their activities, also played their part.
However, it took ten years to get serious: meanwhile, Japan and the Soviet Union in particular were trying to increase their annual hunting quotas for whales, while international opposition to whale hunting was mounting.
Finally, in 1982, the IWC passed a resolution stating that by 1986, the annual quota of whales to be killed would be zero for all countries for ten years. Some countries managed to find loopholes and others left the IWC to continue whaling, but most whale kills have been halted and many species that were on the brink of extinction have since recovered. For example, a recent study by the University of Hamburg and the Alfred Wegener Institute for Marine and Polar Research showed that the population of fin whales in the Southern Ocean has returned in large numbers. And in the case of humpback whales, reproduction rates have increased significantly.
Today, Norway and Japan continue to whal, despite much international criticism. In theory, so does Iceland, which, however, has greatly reduced it in recent years and could give it up in 2024. The country has only one company that hunts whales, Hvalur, and recently its market has shrunk a lot: in 2019 Japan, which is more or less the only country where whale meat is eaten, officially resumed whaling (to a lesser extent earlier, claiming it was for scientific research purposes) and has since stopped buying Icelandic meat. In 2023 the Hvalur hunting license expires and part of the current Icelandic government seems willing not to renew it.
According to the latest IWC data, 810 whales were killed for commercial purposes in 2020.
– Also read: The experiment trying to teach a dolphin to talk