Commercial whaling resumed in Icelandic waters on Friday following a two- month ban imposed over issues for animal welfare.
“Whaling can resume with detailed and stricter requirements for hunting equipment and hunting methods as well as increased supervision,” the fisheries ministry stated in an announcement.
Animal safety teams hit out on the resolution. Humane Society International (HSI) stated the fisheries minister Svandis Svavarsdottir had made an inexplicable resolution.
“Minister Svavarsdottir has dismissed the unequivocal scientific evidence that she herself commissioned, demonstrating the brutality and cruelty of commercial whale killing,” stated Ruud Tombrock, HSI’s government director for Europe.
“There is simply no way to make harpooning whales at sea anything other than cruel and bloody, and no amount of modifications will change that,” added Tombruck.
Permission
Iceland, Norway and Japan are the one nations that permit industrial whaling. But Iceland suspended its whale hunt on 20 June after a government-commissioned report concluded the hunt doesn’t adjust to the nation’s Animal Welfare Act.
Monitoring by Iceland’s Food and Veterinary Authority on the fin whale hunt discovered that the killing of the animals took too lengthy based mostly on the primary aims of the Animal Welfare Act.
Video clips broadcast by the veterinary authority confirmed a whale’s agony because it was hunted for 5 hours.
Iceland suspended looking fin whales in 2016 because of a declining marketplace for whale meat. Hunting resumed for the 2018 season when 146 fin whales had been killed.
Icelandic whalers killed a single minke whale between 2019 and 2021, and 148 fin whales in 2022.
Will Japan ever cease looking whales?
Annual quotas authorise the killing of 209 fin whales – the second-longest marine mammal after the blue whale – and 217 minke whales, one of many smallest species.
“Whales already face myriad threats in the oceans from pollution, climate change, entanglement in fish nets and ship strikes,” stated Tombruck.
“With the need for whale protection so critical. this is a devastating rejection of a once-in-a-generation opportunity to end the slaughter at sea.
“There is a brand new shameful entry within the conservation historical past books, Iceland had an opportunity to do the suitable factor and it selected to not.”
Originally revealed on RFI