Whales competing?

In recent years Japan's Institute for Cetacean Research (ICR), an instrument of the whaling industry and the operators of so-called "scientific whaling" operations in the Antarctic and North Pacific, has produced two documents claiming that whales eat such enormous quantities of fish that they are serious "enemies" of fishermen. These documents have never been formally published in the scientific literatures, but are used extensively by the Government of Japan to justify steadily increasing killing of several whale species - now including endangered ones, the abolition of whale sanctuaries, and the elimination of the existing moratorium on commercial whaling.

Additionally the same argument is used to frighten the governments of developing world fishing nations, and others, to join the International Whaling Commission (IWC) and add their votes to Japan's efforts to destroy the IWC as an inter-governmental organisation responsible for whale conservation as well as the precautionary regulation of any and all whaling.

A new study, "Whales Competing?" is a critical analysis of the two Japanese documents, by an eminent fisheries scientist who has been involved in the IWC's activities for 45 years. Dr Sidney Holt demonstrates that the Japanese documents are in fact a confidence trick, methodologically unsound, and essentially irrelevant to the serious scientific analysis of the impact of whaling and fishing on stocks of fishes and whales, and vice versa."

French

Source: WDCS