COMMENTARY

Using modern technology to slaughter wild creatures

by the Green Hornet

Tuesday,  February 21, 2006

It wasn’t so long ago that our great-grandfathers and great-great-grandfathers went to sea for months on end and didn’t return until they had a ship full of turtles. They survived the privations of the Miskito Banks, living off the ocean’s bounty and seabird eggs, while they hunted the turtles that gave them a living – whether from the shells exported to Europe and America for combs and “tortoiseshell” ornaments or the meat.

Those were the days that Herman Melville wrote about in his famous book Moby Dick, which tells the story of one man’s obsession to find and kill the elusive great white whale that he called Moby Dick. 

Melville is remembered chiefly for this book, which was based on his experiences as a seaman in the mid-nineteenth century. The lengthy epic about Captain Ahab’s insane hunt for the great white whale has been a cornerstone of American literature for the past hundred years

Its elaborate descriptions of whaling and its religious allusions have marked it as an indispensable part of American heritage.

At the end of this wonderful adventure story, Captain Ahab meets his doom, pinned to the back of the mammoth whale by the very harpoons he has hurled into its side.

Our ancestors, too, braved the elements to capture and kill gigantic turtles. So successful were they that they hunted these amazing creatures to the edge of extinction. When the international ban on turtle fishing finally came, the market for turtle shell had vanished – shell had long been replaced by plastic. 

And the ban came none too soon, for our grandchildren may not see turtles alive and swimming the Caribbean Sea. It’s one of the reasons we need to ban turtle fishing completely.

No more licences

Our fishermen with turtle licences use modern fine-filament nets to catch their prey. They don’t have to fight the wind and other elements, nor do they have to camp out for weeks on end on treacherous cays. 

No, they cruise comfortably in their Johnson-powered speedboats with all “mod cons” – fridges and stoves, comfortable bunks, hot and cold running water. Don’t expect these guys to rough it. No sir!

Warfare on whales 

Just like Captain Ahab, the Japanese continue to slaughter the world’s biggest mammals in the southern oceans. They cynically pretend it is for research. Yeah, right! We know where the whale meat ends up – in the markets and restaurants of Japan.

Let’s think about whales for a moment. Like dolphins they are intelligent mammals. Some say they are as intelligent as we are. But because they live in the ocean, we continue their slaughter. Yes, “we”, in the Caribbean, for the Japanese have bought the votes of many Caribbean countries on the International Whaling Commission. 

They purchased them with big-buck bribes that they euphemistically call aid, continually trying to get the IWC to reverse its long-standing decision that bans whale hunting.

In the meantime, they have declared open warfare on fin and humpback whales.

The BBC last month reported that Japanese whalers are currently testing a high-tech fragmentation harpoon, equipped with an enlarged charge of high explosive, to slaughter endangered whales in the seas around Antarctica. 

The device is being used to kill humpback and fin whales, after Japan’s unilateral decision to break with an international consensus to protect them. 

The explosive harpoons hurl shards of metal through the whale’s body to sever major nerves and blood vessels and so cause rapid death, the story says, and experts from Japan’s Institute of Cetacean Research are aboard the whaling fleet of eight catcher boats plus support vessels to determine the effectiveness of the super-harpoon. 

Masayuki Komatsu, executive director of the Japan Fisheries Research Agency, says that standard harpoons used to kill minke whales could not ensure a swift death for larger whales. “Because new species have been added to the research project this year which are larger than a minke whale, we thought we would need a bigger grenade on the end of the harpoon to ensure the killing is instantaneous,” he says. 

The move has justifiably infuriated the environmental NGOs Greenpeace and Sea Shepherd, a more radical anti-whaling group, which regard it as a step towards the resumption of commercial whaling. 

To international condemnation, Japan announced last year that its whaling fleet would kill up to 50 endangered humpback whales and 50 fin whales, along with the 935 minke whales that it would catch within the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary around Antarctica this season. Tokyo refuses to recognise the sanctuary.

Not research at all 

“This is commercial whaling in disguise, not a scientific programme,” says Mizuki Kitana, a spoksewoman for Greenpeace Japan in Tokyo. “When the ships return to Japan, the meat will go straight to market even though most people in Japan never eat whale. The fisheries agency already has plenty of whale meat in stock and it’s clear they are trying to expand the market and get more whale back on menus,” she says. 

The new weapon uses a “warhead” redesigned to penetrate the thickest layers of skin, blubber and bone. The body of the harpoon has also been redesigned, using research from battlefield weapons, so that it shatters into sharper fragments. 

“This is the new, advanced version of the harpoon grenade and a big improvement on previous versions,” says Shigeko Misaki, a writer who specialises in whaling issues and was until recently an official of the Japan Whaling Association. “If the grenades that used to be fired missed the target they just prolonged the whale’s death, so this grenade is a far more humane method,” she says. 

However, the environmental groups monitoring the fleet say that the harpoons do not always work as intended, so the animals can take a long time to die. “Our campaigners have watched the harpooners in action and say that death is seldom instantaneous,” says Kitana. 

According to the International Whaling Commission, it can take up to 14 minutes for a whale that has had a grenade explode inside its body to die. Mortally wounded whales used to be electrocuted via another harpoon fired into the body that would shock the heart, but this method was outlawed by the International Whaling Commission in 2001. 

Nowadays, whales that do not die immediately are supposed to be shot in the head with large-calibre rifles. However, according to Greenpeace campaigners who witnessed such incidents, some are dragged backwards until they drown.

To say that the actions of the Japanese whaling fleet are inhumane is probably the understatement of the century. To use weapons developed for killing people to butcher helpless wild animals is about as low as we can go as a species, I think. 

But using modern technology to kill endangered whales so different from using modern technology to kill endangered turtles? 

Think about it! 

Captain Ahabs we are not. Are we?

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