Why Whales Matter More Than Ever in the Fight Against Climate Change





For over 4,000 years, whales were hunted down. Every part of the whale had a use: meat, skin, blubber, and organs as nutritional food; baleen (the filter-feeding system inside the mouths that looks like a comb) as fishing line or even roofing material; and bones turned into tools.

But today, Iceland, Norway, and Japan are the only countries to continue whaling, banned in 1986. Together, they have killed nearly 40,000 large whales since then. They are primarily hunted for food served as raw sashimi. Japan excuses whaling for scientific purposes, but in reality, they have killed way more than necessary: “research” meat is in the food market, too.

The Icelandic government is justifying it with supposed tougher regulations that are nothing but pointless and irrelevant. The excuse is that improvements in the killing method with grenade-tipped harpoons could reduce suffering by making the process faster, which still means…killing. There is no way to make harpooning whales at sea anything other than cruel and bloody, and no modifications will change that.