DURHAM, N.C. – The International Whaling Commission’s policy of issuing special permits that allow member nations to harvest and kill whales for scientific purposes undermines global conservation efforts and “should end now,” a 91 marine biologist told a U.S. House of Representatives subcommittee on June 10.

“Programs in which whales are harvested under the guise of science” have killed tens of thousands of whales since the late 1980s and added nothing to our understanding of endangered or threatened whale populations that could not be obtained through nonlethal techniques such as genetic markers or tissue samples, said Andrew J. Read, Rachel Carson Associate Professor of Marine Conservation Biology at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment.

“It is not necessary to kill any whale to obtain this information,” he said.

Read was one of three experts who testified at a House Subcommittee on Fisheries, Wildlife and Oceans oversight hearing in advance of the annual International Whaling Commission (IWC) meeting, June 23-27 in Santiago, Chile.

An authority on marine mammals, Read has served on the IWC’s Scientific Committee for more than a decade, including five years as chair of its Subcommittee on Small Cetaceans.  

In his congressional testimony, he presented an overview of past depletion of whale populations as a result of overexploitation, along with examples of the IWC’s Special Permit program that allows nations to capture and kill whales for research purposes, a practice euphemistically known as scientific whaling.

Read urged U.S. delegates at the upcoming IWC meeting to lead efforts to abolish the controversial practice, which is permitted under an IWC provision that was established more than 60 years ago, before the advent of modern non-lethal research techniques. Not only does the provision allow the sale of harvested whales on the commercial market, he noted, but it does not limit how many can be killed.

“Since 1987, the government of Japan has killed almost 10,000 whales in the North Pacific and Antarctic under their special permit program. The governments of Norway and Iceland have engaged in smaller lethal research programs in the North Atlantic,” Read said.

Such programs, he said, often “kill an entire whale to describe its last meal,” an abuse he described as “overkill of truly leviathan proportions.”

Read set forth three critical goals for the U.S. delegation at the upcoming IWC meeting: It must press for an end to special permits for scientific whaling; oppose the creation any new category of whaling that allows commercialization of whale products; and oppose the resumption of commercial whaling until a fully transparent, third-party monitoring system is put in place to prevent future harvests from exceeding catch limits.

“It is my personal view that it will be extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible, to control whaling should the IWC agree to resume a commercial harvest,” he said. “We have only to look at our past failed attempts to control the commercial harvests of … other high-value marine resources, such as bluefin tuna, to see the perils in authorizing such ventures.”