The International Whaling Commission has been unsuccessful in imposing a complete ban on whaling. Some countries such as Japan have invoked their right to continue catching whales supposedly for research studies. The agency had declared a 23-year-old whaling moratorium, but what it is sadly left to do is police whaling ships. The group is also in a quandary whether to ban whaling completely or just limit whale hunting.

Marine biologists held the view that ‘whale numbers were largely unchanged.’ Unfortunately for whalers, some scientific researches clearly prove why ‘whales should never be hunted again.’

The old assumption was that the North Atlantic’s original humpback whale population was more than 20 times larger than the present population. At current volume rate, this suggested that the ‘population has recovered sufficiently to allow a resumption of whaling.’

New findings reveal that the global population of humpbacks may once have been around 1.5 million, rather than the 100,000 as estimated.

Eastern Arctic bowheads numbered almost a million, but the population whittled until they were virtually all gone, all within just a few decades. They have disappeared completely from the waters of Greenland which was ‘once the biggest whaling ground in the world.’

“The systematic destruction of the great whales was a stupendous act of modern ecological folly…” Jeremy Jackson of Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego writes in a recent paper in Whales, Whaling and Ocean Ecosystems. “(T)he ecological consequences of the removal of so many behemoths must have been profound.”

Jackson states that there was, indeed, profusion of whales in the past. ‘Even the most “recovered” of today’s whale populations are only a tiny fraction of their former numbers.’

The resumption of whaling may not necessarily be an option anymore. Recent scientific researches have revealed that whaling is not ‘harvesting a sustainable resource.’ There is no such thing as sustainable whaling.

Via environment360