Japan said today that it plans to go ahead with its annual whale hunt of about 1,000 whales (AFP). For the first time this will include humpbacks, currently listed as a vulnerable species on the IUCN Red List.

A group of legal experts gathered by the International Fund for Animal Welfare think the humpback take could well be illegal. Japan insists that its whaling is for research purposes, although meat from the animals caught does end up being eaten. The IFAW group says this selling of meat could mean Japan is in breach of its obligations under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (press release, coverage in The Age).

“Japan’s repeated assertion that its whaling activities are legal is incorrect and misleading. ‘Scientific whaling’ as conducted by Japan violates international law and should not be allowed to continue,” said Alberto Szekely, professor of international law and coordinator of the panel (press release).

Australia’s opposition Labor party, which may think voters in the forthcoming elections will look well on kindness to whales, has said it would consider deploying the military to monitor the Japanese whaling fleet (The Age, The Australian).

“We are going to use, if appropriate, military resources to monitor the activities of the whaling vessels. Currently there is no monitoring. We are dependent upon the reports that they provide, from their self-interest point of view,” opposition foreign affairs spokesman Robert McClelland said (AFP).

Once again it seems that this debate will break down into black and white arguments, which is a shame. There may be a case to be made for eating whales. This CITES report from 2000 says Minke whales, for instance, could prove a sustainable catch [NB: see this comment below regarding this document – Ed]. Hunting humpbacks and blue whales though is a different matter.

While some may object to any hunting of whales, we need to admit that different cultures have different values; dog lovers may find some Korean cuisine distasteful, Hindus probably don’t approve of eating cows. In a nicely balanced AP story Yoji Kita, described as the whale industry’s point man in the southern Japanese town of Taiji, notes of anti-whalers, “They just completely reject people whose thinking isn’t the same as theirs. In their ‘global standard’, there are a lot of double standards.”

Image: Corbis