Despite Protection Dolphins and Whales are Hunted

This dolphin was a victim of bycatch near the small fishing village of Lavanono on Madagascar’s southern coast. Incidental capture by fisheries is one of the greatest threats to dolphins and porpoises..

The International Whaling Commission (IWC) does not regulate hunts of pilot whales like these animals taken in the North Atlantic’s Faroe Islands. And despite the IWC’s commercial whaling moratorium on larger species, several nations still hunt them in significant numbers, including Japan, Norway, and Iceland.

Fishermen at Futo, Japan’s 1994 dolphin hunt used boats and nets to herd dolphin to inshore coves for the slaughter. Futo ended the annual practice for a number of years in the mid 2000s but has since resumed this type of traditional hunt, which also continues in other Japanese communities.

Japan claims its “scientific whaling” obeys international law, but it does not honor its intent, according to governments and organizations that have filed protests, including the United States, Australia, New Zealand, the European Union, and the World Wildlife Fund.

Whalers from the Indonesian island of Lamalera do battle with a sperm whale as they have for many generations—on the most intimate terms. Harpooners leap from their boats wielding a bladed bamboo pole called a kafe, which they use to stab at whales while risking their own lives.

Japanese whalers aboard the Kyo Maru Number One landed these whales in the Southern Ocean during the 2005-06 season—and did so despite the determined efforts of activists who used their own vessels to try to thwart the hunt.

A young boy from Kontu, Papua New Guinea, sits with a pair of speared dolphins while watching the village men continue their traditional hunt in the waters off New Ireland’s reef. Marine life has long been an essential source of nourishment here and hunts like this are rooted in ancient tradition.

Sergey Puchineot, an indigenous hunter of the Chukot region in Russia’s Far East, opens fire on a gray whale with a Russian Army-issue semiautomatic weapon. The indigenous peoples of Chukot and Washington State are allowed to take Eastern North Pacific gray whales under the IWC’s aboriginal subsistence catch limits—a total of 620 animals between 2008 and 2012.

Whale blood runs back into the Southern Ocean from the decks of a Japanese whaling vessel.

Heaps of beluga whale bones on a Svalbard beach bear witness to a whaling heyday long past. The small, social white whales commonly swim in Arctic and subarctic waters where they are still targeted by indigenous people and some larger fishing operations—but in Svalbard they are protected.

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