Japanese "scientists" harpoon a minke whale. (Greenpeace photo)
Japan and other pro-whaling nations walked out of the International Whaling Commission’s annual talks in Jersey Thursday in protest of a proposal to create a symbolic whale sanctuary in the South Atlantic.
Delegates from Japan and Iceland, as well as a number of Caribbean and African nations that totally allegedly receive payoffs to vote in line with Japan, threw the IWC’s meeting into disarray when they walked out Thursday. It was unclear whether the IWC could hold a vote on the proposal after the walkout.
The creation of a whale sanctuary in the South Atlantic would be mostly symbolic, considering few whales are hunted there. Whaling nations considered the proposal unscientific–much as anti-whaling nations consider Japan’s research whaling unscientific.
I think it would make no difference even if the IWC did create a whale sanctuary in the South Atlantic. Japanese whalers scientists already hunt whales in the Antarctic sanctuary, the breeding ground for 80 percent of the world’s whales.