The Hunt, the Furor

By MICHAEL D. LEMONICK

By early June, the four-ton, 30-ft.-long female minke whale was done with her winter sojourn in temperate waters. It was time to head back to the chilly Arctic for the summer. Traveling north, she and her fellow minkes would periodically dive down to gulp fish, then swim back to the surface to suck air through their blowhole -- for like all whales, minkes are air-breathing mammals. They followed an age-old migratory track, invisible to humans but as well marked as an interstate highway to the whales.

Unfortunately for this particular whale, the track led directly up the coast of Norway -- and on June 17, into the path of the Ann Brita. A few minutes and a well-placed harpoon later, the minke's destiny abruptly changed course. Instead of reaching the Arctic, she ended up on an auction block in the Norwegian port of Svolvaer, sold to the highest bidder for $2.50 a lb. This minke was the first of 160 hauled in by Norway this season for commercial sale. Each of these catches violated the worldwide ban on for-profit hunting established by the International Whaling Commission (IWC) in 1986. (More than 130 others were hunted legally for scientific purposes, although many environmentalists claim that the science involved was minimal.) All the catches were fully approved by the Norwegian government.

Norway knew it was asking for trouble by going after whales for profit, but that didn't make the ensuing uproar any easier to take. Letters of protest have poured into Norway's embassy in Washington. Environmental groups have called on consumers to boycott the country's exports and on travelers to stay away from Norway, especially during next year's Winter Olympics in Lillehammer. German and British companies have canceled several million dollars' worth of contracts for Norwegian food. And the U.S. Commerce Department will decide within a week or two whether Norway's actions make it potentially subject to trade restrictions on the more than $1 billion of Norwegian products exported to the U.S. every year.

Yet despite being branded an international outlaw and threatened with an economic backlash, Norway insists that the whaling will go on. Its resolve is strengthened by the confidence that other countries may follow: Iceland, which quit the IWC last year over the same issue, says it will resume whaling next summer, ban or no. Japan will abide by the rules for now, but has lobbied the IWC to allow limited whaling. All three nations argue that the current policy is governed by emotion, not rational science. They contend that a careful harvest of relatively plentiful species like the minke is harmless. Says Norwegian Prime Minister Gro Harlem Brundtland: "We cannot allow uninformed sentiment to decide on the controlled use of our natural resources."

Her words cut to the heart of a dispute that has been going on for decades. Are whales just another animal, to be protected when threatened with extinction but otherwise exploited? Or are they somehow different, a race of intelligent, sensitive mammals that deserves special treatment? Norway's action has raised these questions anew; so has the release of Free Willy, the sentimental movie about a boy who rescues a killer whale from a rundown aquatic theme park. (O.K., a killer whale is technically more of a giant dolphin than a whale, but the distinction is mostly academic.) A phone number flashed on the screen during Free Willy's closing credits, offering information on how to join a campaign to protect whales, drew 40,000 calls the first weekend alone.

Unlike many ecological debates, the controversy over whether to save the whales -- or even what that means -- does not divide into neat ideological camps. Many whalers agree that some species need saving; many environmentalists -- including Brundtland, considered one of the world's most conservation-conscious leaders -- think that some carefully regulated whaling is acceptable. Argues Heidi Sorensen, head of the Norwegian environmental organization Nature and Youth: "We love the minke whale -- in the same way that we love the reindeer and the elk. These are animals that are not threatened with extinction and that we hunt."

Reasonable words. But humanity's relationship to whales has never been bound by reason. Whales have always been too magnificent and mysterious to be seen as just another animal. They look like fish but suckle their young; they're intelligent, communicating with an eerie array of sounds; and, of course, all but the smallest are humblingly huge, the largest creatures to grace the earth since the demise of the dinosaurs.

Unlike the snail darter, which only a militant ecologist could love, whales are inherently irresistible. People crowd by the millions into aquariums and theme parks to watch belugas and killer whales go through their paces. Tens of thousands risk seasickness each year to join whale-watching cruises. Songs of the Humpback Whale, a record of cetacean squeals and groans first released in 1970, sold 100,000 copies that year and has remained a fixture in New Age record bins.

But one man's object of adoration is another man's prey. Whaling began centuries ago, spurred by the human need for whale meat and oils. The development of efficient "factory ships" in the 1920s almost wiped out the leviathans, leading ultimately to formation of the IWC in 1946. The commission tried for more than three decades to protect selected species before it finally decided that a total ban on commercial whaling was necessary.

In general, the moratorium appears to be working. Most whale stocks are at least holding steady, and some have begun to recover. For example, populations of humpbacks off South Africa have grown substantially. A study by the National Marine Fisheries Service says there were an estimated 2,050 blue whales off California in 1991, up from several hundred in 1980. And California gray whales, which migrate 13,000 miles a year between Baja California and the Bering and Chukchi seas, have increased from several thousand to 25,000 since the 1940s; they were taken off the U.S. Endangered Species List late last year.

Scientists have such a tough time studying whales, however, that it is hard to say when a species is out of danger. Blue whales, for instance, live in deep water far away from coasts, making it impossible for census takers in boats or planes to get an accurate count. In the North Atlantic the U.S. Navy is helping biologists track blue, finback and minke whales by using submarine- detection systems that pick up whale sounds.

The IWC's hunting ban has done nothing to eliminate other human activities that also threaten the animals. Commercial fisheries deplete the whales' feeding grounds and disrupt their breeding areas and nurseries. Scientists suspect that PCBs, pesticides and other toxic chemicals leak into rivers and out to sea, weaken whales' immune systems and drive down their birthrates. Observes Scott Kraus, a marine biologist with the New England Aquarium: "The public gets hung up on whaling, but what's really worse is what we flush down the toilet."

In the Canadian section of the St. Lawrence River, flanked by both agriculture and industry, whale hunting stopped in the late 1940s. But the population of belugas there has hovered around 500 ever since. Antarctica's stock of blue whales, not hunted since 1966, also hovers at about 500; a half- century ago they were 500 times as numerous.

Most endangered of all is the northern right whale. Nearly 60 years after hunting the species was forbidden by the League of Nations, only 350, at most, swim the waters of the Atlantic. One-third of right-whale deaths recorded since 1970 resulted from collisions with ships or accidental entanglement in fishing nets.

No one is talking about killing right whales, or sperm whales or blues. In fact, Norway, Iceland and Japan support the idea of a ban on hunting some species, but they say that those not endangered should be fair game. Observes Georg Blikfeldt of Norway's High North Association, a lobbying organization: "Nobody wants to hunt the large whales anymore because they are threatened. But the argument that whales must therefore not be hunted at all is like saying that because one breed of pig is on the verge of dying out, nobody should eat pork."

In the nations that support whaling, it is a venerable way of life. Says Japan's Shimasaburo Hamai, 69, retired after 45 years as a harpooner in a land where monuments were once dedicated to the souls of hunted whales: "I want our whaling tradition to be passed on to the coming generation." Nordin Olafsson, master of the Norwegian whaling vessel Nybraena, calls the hunt "a vital part of our culture. It is hardly a major part of the national budget -- but for those fishermen who need it, it is a crucial source of income."

The other argument is that unlike their larger cousins, minke whales are so plentiful -- there are an estimated 86,700 living off the coast of Norway alone, and a total of 900,000 worldwide -- that a controlled hunt wouldn't harm the species. No less a body than the scientific committee of the IWC has decided that the minkes could indeed tolerate a limited hunt; the committee recommended that the whaling ban be partly lifted.

At the IWC's annual meeting last May in Japan, the group rejected that proposal, provoking the scientific committee's chairman, Philip Hammond of Britain's Sea Mammal Research Unit, to resign. Wrote Hammond: "I can no longer justify to myself being the organizer and spokesman for a committee whose work is held in such disregard by the body to which it is responsible."

That, argue whalers and their supporters, is why the IWC ban deserves to be disregarded. Says Kristjan Loftsson, a manager at the idled Icelandic Whaling Co. factory near Reykjavik: "Environmentalism has become a self-strengthening religious movement. Whether it takes one, five or 10 years, this madness will subside. Norway has begun; we will follow."

But if the U.S. imposes tough sanctions -- and in comparable situations, the threat alone has been enough -- Norway's defiance will probably not last long, despite the strong words of its Prime Minister. Pressure from other countries is being echoed at home. Several firms that could be affected by a boycott, including the parent company of Royal Viking and Norwegian Cruise lines, have issued antiwhaling protests.

If the idea of sanctions doesn't work, and Iceland and Japan join Norway in resuming commercial whaling, their revolt could either force the IWC to yield on the issue or destroy the organization. Both prospects alarm environmentalists. If the IWC were to disappear, it is unclear who would regulate commercial whaling. Not just minkes might be threatened but the most severely endangered species as well.

The same thing could happen if the IWC gives in; permission to go after one species could lead to requests to hunt others. Opponents regard as absurd the idea of a "sustainable" harvest, even of the abundant minke. Says Nina Young, a biologist with the Center for Marine Conservation in Washington: "Historically, we have failed miserably at calculating how many whales we can catch without decimating a population." Besides, cheating can render quotas meaningless, as "controlled" ivory trading has shown.

Such fact-based arguments -- along with comparable arguments on the other side -- are a welcome change from the emotion and moral judgments that too often corrupt the debate on whaling. The notion that whales are somehow special, that they should be elevated above the status of mere animals, is likely to convince only the converted. The idea that whale hunting is a cultural tradition worth preserving no matter what the cost is questionable. (Would the same argument apply to cockfighting?) Concludes Sam Sadove of the Okeanos Ocean Research Foundation in Hampton Bays, New York: "The most important questions are, Can the species coexist with whaling? Are whales a harvestable food source?" An enormous amount of scientific research remains to be done before those questions can be definitively answered.

With reporting by Andrea Dorfman/New York, Julian Isherwood/Oslo and Rod Paul/Portsmouth