[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 36 (Monday, February 27, 1995)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E450-E451]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


            SUSTAINABLE CONSUMPTIVE USE OF MARINE RESOURCES

                                 ______


                             HON. DON YOUNG

                               of alaska

                    in the house of representatives

                       Monday, February 27, 1995
  Mr. YOUNG of Alaska. Mr. Speaker, this Nation has had an enviable and 
successful record, both domestically and internationally, of fostering 
sound conservation and scientific management of wildlife and marine 
resources. Through statutes, regulation and international treaties, the 
United States has traditionally taken a leadership role in demanding 
science-based information and data upon which to shape policy and 
programs for the conservation of plants, animals, and fish. An integral 
part of wildlife and resource management is the concept of consumptive 
use of such renewable resources under proper and professional 
management.
  In the February issue of the American Spectator there is a most 
thought provoking article by David Andrew Price regarding the issue of 
whaling by coastal and island nations. With the exception of a small 
science-based harvest of whales by natives in Alaska, the United States 
is no longer a consumer or producer of whale products. For other 
nations, however, whale products have been a traditional source of food 
for thousands of years. The serious question is whether or not such 
traditional harvests should be blocked when limited taking in no manner 
would have an adverse impact on populations stocks. Further, ignoring 
science in the management of one species of wildlife based upon a 
response to a protectionist philosophy sets a dangerous precedent. 
Wildlife and marine resources cannot afford to be managed on the basis 
of some subjective ethic that ignores science and appropriate 
management.
  I commend Mr. Price's article to my colleagues on a most important 
issue of sustainable use of renewable marine resources and the role of 
the United States in that policy.
              [From the American Spectator, February 1995]

                            Save the Whalers

                        (By David Andrew Price)

       One morning last January, Arvid Enghaugen, a resident of 
     the Norwegian coastal town of Gressvik, found his whaling 
     boat sitting unusually deep in the water. When he climbed 
     aboard to investigate, he found that the ship was in fact 
     sinking; someone had opened its sea cock and padlocked the 
     engine-room door. After breaking the lock, Enghaugen 
     discovered that the engine was underwater. He also found a 
     calling card from the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, a 
     small, California-based environmentalist group that 
     specializes in direct actions against whalers. Counting 
     Enghaugen's boat, Sea Shepherd has sunk or damaged eleven 
     Norwegian, Icelandic, Spanish, and Portuguese vessels since 
     1979.
       The boat was repaired in time for the 1994 whaling season, 
     but Enghaugen's problems weren't over. On July 1, while he 
     was looking for whales off the Danish coast, live Greenpeace 
     protesters boarded the ship from an inflatable dinghy and 
     tried to take its harpoon cannon. Enghaugen's crew tossed one 
     protester into the sea, and the rest then jumped overboard; 
     the protesters were picked up by the dinghy and returned to 
     the Greenpeace mother ship.
       A week later, after Enghaugen's boat shot a harpoon into a 
     whale, a team from another Greenpeace vessel cut the harpoon 
     line to free the wounded animal. A group again tried to board 
     the whaler, and the crew again threw them off. Enghaugen cut 
     a hole in one of the Greenpeace dinghies with a whale 
     flensing knife. For the next two weeks, Enghaugen and crew 
     were dogged by Greenpeace ships and helicopters.
       Although the activities failed to stop Enghaugen's hunt, 
     their public relations war in America has been a different 
     story. Over the past twenty years, the save-the-whales 
     movement has been so successful in shaping public sentiment 
     about the whaling industry that the U.S. and other nations 
     have adopted a worldwide moratorium on whaling. Part of the 
     credit must go to the animals themselves, which are more 
     charismatic on television than Kurds, Bosnians, or Rwandans, 
     who have engendered far less international protection. The 
     movement owes most of its success, however, to the 
     gullibility of Hollywood and the press in passing along bogus 
     claims from whaling's opponents.
       The mainstay of the case against whaling--that it threatens 
     an endangered species--is characteristic of the 
     misinformation. It is true that European nations and the 
     United States killed enormous numbers of whales during 
     commercial whaling's heyday in the nineteenth century, but to 
     say that ``whales'' are endangered is no more meaningful than 
     to say that ``birds'' are endangered; there are more than 
     seventy species of whales, and their numbers vary 
     dramatically. Some are endangered, some are not. The blue 
     whale, the gray whale, and the 
     [[Page E451]]  humpback were indeed depleted, but those 
     species were later protected by international agreement long 
     before the existence of Greenpeace or Sea Shepherd. (There 
     have been abuses. Alexei V. Yablokov, special adviser to the 
     president of Russia for ecology and health, has revealed that 
     the whaling fleet of the former Soviet Union illegally killed 
     more than 700 protected right whales during the 1960's but 
     the International Whaling Commission's institution of an 
     observer program in 1972 essentially put an end to the Soviet 
     fleet's illegal activities.)
       The only whale species that Enghaugen and his fellow 
     Norwegian whalers hunt is the minke, which Norwegians eat as 
     whale steaks, whale meatballs, and whaleburgers. As it turns 
     out, minke whales are no more in danger of extinction than 
     Angus cattle. In 1994, thirty-two Norwegian boats killed a 
     total of 279 minkes, out of an estimated local population of 
     about 87,000 and a world population of around 900,000.
       In 1982 the IWC voted to suspend commercial whaling for a 
     five-year period starting in 1986. The ostensible purpose was 
     to permit the collection of better data on whales before 
     hunting resumed. Norway lodged a reservation exempting itself 
     from the moratorium, as the IWC treaty permitted, but it 
     complied voluntarily.
       Whaling nations soon learned, though, that the majority of 
     nations in the IWC--including the United States--intended to 
     maintain the ban indefinitely, no matter what the numbers 
     showed. Canada left the IWC in 1982, and Iceland left in 
     1992. Norway terminated its voluntary compliance in 1993. To 
     protest the commission's disregard of the facts about whale 
     stocks, the British chairman of the IWC's scientific 
     committee resigned that year pointing out in his angry letter 
     of resignation that the commission's actions ``were nothing 
     to do with science.'' The IWC continued the moratorium anyway 
     at it next meeting.
       A 1993 report by the Congressional Research Service 
     observed that the data on whales undercut the conservationist 
     argument, and that ``if the United States argues for 
     continuing the moratorium on commercial whaling, it may have 
     to rely increasingly on moral and ethical appeals.'' The ban 
     on whaling is no longer about conservation, in other words, 
     but about the desire of many Americans and Western Europeans 
     to impose their feelings about whales upon the whaling 
     nations (which include Iceland, Russia, Japan, and the Inuits 
     of Canada and Alaska).
       Popular notions of whales' human-like intelligence, often 
     cited by opponents of whaling, have little real support. 
     Whales possess large brains, but that proves nothing about 
     their mental agility. Margaret Klinowska, a Cambridge 
     University expert on cetacean intelligence, holds that the 
     structure of the whale brain has more in common with that of 
     comparatively primitive mammals such as hedgehogs and bats 
     than with the brains of primates.
       Whales can be trained to perform stunts and other tasks, 
     but so can pigeons and many other animals that have never 
     been credited with the cerebral powers of homo sapiens. And 
     the idea that whales have something like a human language is, 
     at present, pure folklore. Like virtually all animals, whales 
     make vocalizations, but there is no evidence that they are 
     uttering Whalish words and sentences. Their famed ``singing'' 
     is done only by the males, and then during but half the 
     year--a pattern more suggestive of bird-song than human 
     speech.
       Much of the popular mythology about cetacean intelligence 
     comes from crank scientist John Lilly, a physician who became 
     convinced in the 1950s that whales and dolphins are not only 
     smarter and more communicative than humans, but also have 
     their own civilizations, complete with philosophy, history, 
     and science that are passed down orally through the 
     generations. His conclusions about the animals' mental skills 
     were based partly on his observations of captive dolphins at 
     his lab in the Virgin Islands, but mainly on wild flights of 
     conjecture. Lilly also predicted in the late seventies that 
     the State Department would eventually negotiate treaties with 
     the cetaceans, and that humanity's progress in its dealings 
     with them would lead the Galactic Coincidence Control Center 
     to send agents to planet Earth to open the way for 
     extraterrestrial contacts with us. The anthropomorphization 
     of the whale reached new heights with a 1993 open letter to 
     the Norwegian people from Sea Shepherd president Paul Watson, 
     who predicted, ``The whales will talk about you in the same 
     vein as Jews now talk of Nazis. For in the eyes of whalekind, 
     there is little difference between the behavior of the 
     monsters of the Reich and the monsters behind the harpoon.''
       Cetacean behavior researchers have rejected Lilly's claims. 
     Dolphin investigator Kenneth Norris of the University of 
     California Santa Cruz, who was among the first to study 
     dolphins in the wild and is responsible for much of our 
     knowledge about dolphin sonar, writes that they have ``a 
     complicated animal communication system, yes, but for an 
     abstract syntactic language like ours, no compelling evidence 
     seemed, or seems, to exist.'' The late David and Melba 
     Caldwell, who studied dolphin behavior at the University of 
     Florida, maintained flatly that ``dolphins do not talk.'' In 
     their view, ``dolphins probably are just exceptionally 
     amiable mammals with an intelligence now considered by most 
     workers, on a subjective basis, to be comparable to that of a 
     better-than-average dog.''
       Louis Herman, director of the University of Hawaii's marine 
     mammal laboratory and an opponent of whaling, has been 
     studying the behavior of captive dolphins since 1967. Herman 
     says he has seen no evidence that the natural vocalizations 
     of dolphins constitute a language. And for whales? ``There's 
     no reason to think the situation would be different with 
     other cetacean species,'' he answers.
       What American policy on whaling enforces is simply a 
     cultural preference--one comparable to our distaste for 
     horsemeat, which is favored in France. The whale-savers have 
     succeeded in shaping policy by selling the idea that whales 
     are different; that they are endangered underwater Einsteins. 
     That's why Icelandic filmmaker Magnus Gudmundsson, who has 
     produced a documentary showing Greenpeace's machinations on 
     the issue, is correct in calling the movement ``a massive 
     industry of deception.''
     

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