Iceland's whalers have belatedly been granted a quota of 40 minke whales to kill over the next few months but the government is clearly divided over the issue with Foreign Minister Ingibjorg Solrun Gisladottir warning that resuming the whale hunt could damage Iceland's "long term interests".
Japan has announced it will not kill 50 humpback whales this winter after talks with the United States have increased fears that a political deal is imminent that will lift the 22 year ban on commercial whaling.
On October 4th, Campaign Whale Director Andy Ottaway and MEP Caroline Lucas met with Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas in Brussels, handing him a 110,000 hand-signed petition calling for the EU to do more to protect whales and stop commercial whaling.
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Members of the Makah tribe of the north-west USA illegally killed a grey whale on Saturday 8th September. Although commercial whaling is banned in the United States, the Makah tribe claim they have a cultural, and Treaty right with the US Government, to hunt whales after a lapse of over 70 years.
Campaign Whale has welcomed the announcement by Fisheries Minister Einar Guofinnsson that the Icelandic Government will not permit more whaling after the current quota expires on August 31.
Town councillors in Taiji, Japan, scene of countless cruel dolphin slaughters, have revealed that schoolchildren in the area have been served dolphin meat containing dangerous levels of mercury, prompting warnings of a potential public health disaster as the country attempts to boost consumption of cetacean meat.
"The moot point is, whether Leviathan can long endure so wide a chase, so remorseless a havoc; whether he must not at last be exterminated from the waters, and the last whale, like the last man, smoke his last pipe, and then himself evaporate in the final puff".
Herman Melville, "Moby Dick" , 1851
In 1986, one hundred and thirty-five years and over 2 million dead whales after Melville wrote Moby Dick, commercial whaling worldwide was finally banned, indefinitely, under an international agreement reached in 1952. The International ''Whaling Commission (IWC), founded in 1949 in an attempt to stem the catastrophic over-exploitation of the world''s whale populations, had failed in its primary task "to provide for the proper conservation of whale stocks and thus make possible the orderly development of the whaling industry".