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Marine Policy ](]]]])]]]–]]]
Is Japan’s whaling humane?
Nick Gales
a,
, Russell Leaper
b
, Vassili Papastavrou
b
a
Australian Antarctic Division, 203 Channel Highway, Kingston, Tasmania 7050, Australia
b
International Fund for Animal Welfare, The Old Chapel, Fairview Drive, Bristol BS6 6PW, UK
Received 16 July 2007; received in revised form 20 August 2007; accepted 20 August 2007
Abstract
Video taken by Greenpeace of whaling by the Japanese whaling fleet in the Southern Ocean provided a unique opportunity to obtain
quantitative data relevant to the welfare aspects of the killing of whales. Catches of 16 individual Antarctic minke whales (Balaenoptera
bonaerensis) were analysed and in two of these asphyxiation appeared the most likely cause of death. Fewer than one in five whales were
killed instantaneously and the average time to death for the remaining whales was around 10 min. The presence of Greenpeace did not
result in a reduced accuracy of harpoon shots when compared with previous studies.
r2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Whaling; Killing methods; Welfare
1. Introduction
For the past two decades, a polarised debate has raged in
the Scientific Committee of the International Whaling
Commission (IWC) about the relevance, need and quality
of the science that results from scientific whaling programs
[1–6].
Parallel to this debate has been a less publicised, but
equally polarised dispute over concerns about the manner
in which whales are killed. This issue has a long history
within the IWC, which is recognised as the competent
international body responsible for the conservation of
whales and the regulation of whaling. Indeed, the 1937
International Whaling Conference, which pre-dates the
IWC, recommended that governments ‘‘abate something of
the undoubted cruelty of present methods of whaling’’. The
humane killing of whales was first formally put on the
IWC’s agenda in 1959 [7] following various prior efforts to
develop and test electrical harpoons, which at the time were
felt to be more humane: however, the technology was later
abandoned [8]. In 1980, the IWC took a binding decision to
prohibit the use of the cold (i.e. non-exploding) harpoon
for animal welfare reasons for all species except minke
whales which were themselves later included [9].In
November 1980, the first special workshop was held on
the subject. Since then, there have been a number of
workshops and annual Working Groups on humane killing
and associated welfare issues. The discussion of welfare
issues has thus become firmly established within the IWC
over half a century.
Despite this history, the discussion has suffered due to
the views of some governments, particularly those of Japan
and Iceland, that welfare issues are outside the competence
of the IWC. The lack of willingness of these countries to
provide appropriate and sufficient data has substantially
limited the ability of the IWC to assess aspects of the
welfare of whale killing techniques, particularly those used
in scientific whaling. The provision of data from the killing
of whales for scientific purposes might reasonably be
expected to facilitate the independent analyses of killing
techniques as well as to encourage improved killing
efficiencies and welfare outcomes.
At the annual meeting of the IWC in May 2007,
Norway, Japan and Iceland all gave reasons for not
providing any welfare related data to the IWC. Norway
has taken the position that ‘‘it is no longer necessary to
collect information on each hunt on a regular basis. As in
other activities where animals are killed, for example the
ARTICLE IN PRESS
www.elsevier.com/locate/marpol
0308-597X/$ - see front matter r2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.marpol.2007.08.004
Corresponding author. Tel.: +61 3 62323437; fax: +61 3 62323449.
E-mail addresses: Nick.Gales@aad.gov.au (N. Gales),
rleaper@ifaw.org (R. Leaper),vpapastavrou@ifaw.org (V. Papastavrou).
Please cite this article as: Gales N, et al. Is Japan’s whaling humane? Marine Policy (2007), doi:10.1016/j.marpol.2007.08.004
slaughter of farm animals, common practice is that once a
given killing method has been approved and implemented
on the basis of scientific scrutiny there is no longer any
need for continuous monitoring’’ [10]. Japan had noted
that ‘‘it appears to it that the data provided is only used to
criticise whaling’’ [11] and Iceland ‘‘expressed concern that
the IWC has not been a neutral forum in which to discuss
these matters’’ [10]. Prior to this, the limited data that had
been provided by Japan only related to the killing of minke
whales and data have not been provided for the much
larger species—fin whales (Balaenoptera physalus) and
sperm whales (Physeter macrocephalus) in particular—for
which there are even greater concerns over the welfare
implications of killing methods. Iceland has not provided
any data on the animal welfare aspects of its scientific
whaling for minke whales, stating that the sample size (101
whales up to 2005) was too small for analysis [11].
Although Norway has taken the view that no further
efforts to improve welfare standards for its minke whale
hunt are necessary, the clash of values as to whether
whaling is acceptably humane remains divisive both within
the IWC and global opinion. In the absence of objective
measures, opinions are most likely to diverge further, but
there still remains the question of what data are needed for
an informed debate? The limited data that have been
provided have generally been restricted to average time to
death and proportion of animals judged to be killed
immediately. Although such summary data may be used as
indicators of improvements in hunting methods they reveal
little about the reliability of the technique (the range and
variance around the mean of time to death), nor do they
provide insights as to how techniques may be further
developed to improve welfare outcomes.
2. Analysis of video of whaling
At the 2006 annual meeting of the IWC in St. Kitts, the
first independently acquired data on the killing of Antarctic
minke whales (Balaenoptera bonaerensis) in Japan’s Ant-
arctic scientific whaling program was presented to a
workshop on whale killing methods [13]. We analysed
video of the whale hunt taken by Greenpeace during its
anti-whaling campaign in the Southern Ocean in 2005/2006
in order to determine estimates of the location of the
harpoon strike on the whale, the instantaneous death rates
(IDRs) and the times to death (TTDs) for those animals
not killed instantaneously. The analysis of the near-
continuous video showed that of 16 observed kills of
Antarctic minke whales, fewer than one in five was
estimated to have been killed instantaneously. The average
TTD for whales not killed instantly was just under 10 min
(mean ¼598 s, S.D. ¼684 s, n¼10) and two whales
survived for at least 25 min (27 m 25 s and 33 m 12 s).
These figures are underestimates since the times were
measured to the last time at which the whale was clearly
alive and visible to the camera. Whales could have still
been alive even when no strong movements or blows were
apparent and in some cases the last time when the whale
was seen alive was at the start of a dive. The two kills with
the longest TTD were events where the whale was injured
by the first harpoon hit but not secured. Such events do not
appear to have been included in the previously reported
mean TTD data by Japan [14].
In 2 out of 16 events, the Greenpeace video revealed that
asphyxiation was the most likely cause of death (Fig. 1). In
one of these cases a line was passed around the tail and the
whale was transferred from the bow to the side of the
catcher vessel, leaving it suspended alongside, unable to
bring its blowhole to the surface to breath, but still clearly
alive and struggling. In the other case there was almost
continuous, wide angle video from the time of the harpoon
shot until the whale appeared dead, 16 m 44 s later. The
whale was last seen to be alive 14 m 02 s after the harpoon
shot. It had survived without a breath up until that time
but appeared to be dead by 16 m 44 s. At 12 m 54 s after the
harpoon shot there was a break of 16 s in the filming.
However, the video just prior to the break and immediately
ARTICLE IN PRESS
Fig. 1. An Antarctic minke whale is suspended from the bow of a catcher
vessel by a harpoon line, causing the suffocation of the animal and
preventing the whale being killed more rapidly with a rifle as a secondary
killing technique. rJeremy Sutton-Hilbert/Greenpeace 2006.
N. Gales et al. / Marine Policy ](]]]])]]]–]]]2
Please cite this article as: Gales N, et al. Is Japan’s whaling humane? Marine Policy (2007), doi:10.1016/j.marpol.2007.08.004
afterwards showed the rear half of the whale was
suspended by a tight line and there appeared no possibility
for it to get its head above water during the break. We are
aware of one report of an entangled minke whale surviving
underwater for 17 min [15] and theoretical predictions of
aerobic dive limit based on stored oxygen are about 16 min
for an 8 m minke whale [16]. For a whale that had been
subject to an extended, high speed, chase before being
harpooned, its oxygen stores are likely to have been
depleted and it seems likely that asphyxiation was the
ultimate cause of death.
The general procedure for killing whales that survive the
first harpoon strike is to winch the whale close to the bow
of the ship and use rifles to shoot the animal in the brain.
For whales harpooned in the abdomen, or rear half of the
body, this practice keeps the head underwater, making it
impossible to obtain a clear shot to the brain with a rifle.
A substantial proportion of whales are struck in the
abdomen and we conclude that these whales would likely
die by asphyxiation. Indeed, video taken from an unim-
peded catcher vessel in 1992/1993 also showed similar
situations of live whales suspended by the tail [17].
The Government of Japan challenged our conclusions
[11] suggesting that the presence of the Greenpeace vessels
impeded their usual hunting practices and that conse-
quently the data were not representative. Clearly, our
sample size is small and although Japan reported that 26
whales were killed while Greenpeace was present, video
was only available for 17 events. It is possible that quicker
kills were less likely to be captured on video, resulting in
some selectivity bias. Concerns were expressed that
interference may have impeded the ability of the gunner
to obtain an accurate shot or hindered application of
secondary killing methods. In order to evaluate whether
such concerns were justified we measured the locations of
each of the harpoon strikes. Whales struck closer to the tail
are less likely to experience a near instantaneous death
[19,20]. Previous sources showing the locations at which
minke whales were hit by harpoons include data from
Japanese commercial whaling during the 1978/1979 sea-
sons [21], data from the 1992/1993 JARPA [17], and data
from Norwegian minke whale hunts 2000–2002 [20]. The
2005/2006 video allowed the locations of 17 harpoon shots
to be measured based on previously reported measure-
ments of body parts as a proportion of body length [22].
Corrections were applied for estimated viewing angle and
where possible the mean of multiple measurements was
used to give the locations shown in Fig. 2. Both sides of the
whale have been combined for the purposes of this figure
and only harpoon entry points are shown. Two cases are
included where a whale was shot twice. One of these shots
was to a whale that was already tethered and was excluded
from further analysis due to not being representative of
shooting a freely moving animal.
The mean location expressed as the proportion of body
length caudal (aft) of the snout for the remaining 16 hits
was 0.48 (S.D. ¼0.12). Based on observations of seven hits
made from whaling vessels during the 1992/1993 JARPA
[17] we calculated an equivalent mean location of
approximately 0.53 (S.D. ¼0.17) of the body length. Thus,
the mean of observed hits in 2005/2006 was slightly closer
to the brain, but the difference was not significant (T-test,
p¼0.45). A common boundary between studies of hit
locations on the whale’s body is a line approximately 47%
of the whale’s body length from the snout [20,21]. There
were no significant differences between the number of hits
forward (cranial) or aft (caudal) of this line (w
2
¼2.74,
d.f. ¼2, p¼0.25) from either Japanese commercial whal-
ing, Norwegian commercial whaling or the 2005/2006
video of Japanese scientific whaling (Table 1). Hence, the
accuracy of the initial shot, and thus the IDR did not
appear to have been affected by the presence of Green-
peace. Similarly, for the whales not killed instantly, our
estimate of mean TTD is within the range of those
previously reported by Japan for whales that were struck
and eventually killed [14].
3. Whaling in the context of other experiments involving live
animals
The legislative framework and ethical standards that
determine animal killing practices and govern the scientific
use of laboratory and free-ranging animals vary inter-
nationally. Where these guidelines exist, the standards
applied to the use of animals for science—particularly for
free ranging animals—are generally substantially higher
than for other uses. These standards for science are a
modern and relatively consistent international norm, less
influenced by cultural, political or religious factors than
practices such as recreational hunting, subsistence hunting
or commercial slaughter. In Japan, animal welfare laws
that are applied to the use of animals in science are over
three decades old, and have been recognised as being in
need of updating—indeed a representative of the Science
Council of Japan commented that, in this context, Japan
has a reputation ‘‘as an outlaw country without rules’’ [23].
ARTICLE IN PRESS
Fig. 2. Location of harpoon impacts based on photogrammetric analysis
of 2005/2006 video.
Table 1
Number of harpoon hits of minke whales relative to position along body
Number of harpoon
hits relative to a line
47% of body length
from snout
Japanese
commercial
whaling 1978/
1979 (1)
Norwegian
commercial
whaling
2000–2002 (2)
2005/2006
video
Forward (Cranial) 100 1129 9
Aft (Caudal) 52 477 7
N. Gales et al. / Marine Policy ](]]]])]]]–]]] 3
Please cite this article as: Gales N, et al. Is Japan’s whaling humane? Marine Policy (2007), doi:10.1016/j.marpol.2007.08.004
The conduct of Japan in its whaling activities in the
Southern Ocean and elsewhere—which is claimed to be
conducted for purely scientific reasons—does little to alter
such a view. The justification of hunting practices for
scientific whaling that result in lower IDR and longer TTD
compared to commercial whaling, in order that the
‘‘selected whale should actually be taken to ensure
mathematical accuracy’’ [17], is a case in point.
The assessment as to whether any hunt is humane is
generally a relative judgement. For example, beaver
hunting with rifles has been judged [24] to be relatively
humane compared to red deer (Cervus elaphus) shot by
professional stalkers [25] or wild impala (Aepyceros
melampus) culled at night [26], based on over 95% of
beavers being immobilised instantly. This compares to
estimates of wounding rates of red deer by stalkers which
showed that 11% of deer required two or more shots to
kill, 7% took 2–15 min to die and 2% escaped wounded
[25]. Currently, commercial and scientific whaling hunts
primarily target northern (Balaenoptera acutorostrata)
and Antarctic minke whales, which are among the smallest
of the baleen whales. By any standards, the Southern
Ocean hunts that achieve extremely low IDRs, have TTD
that commonly run substantially over 10 min, and appear
to regularly use asphyxiation as a secondary killing
technique are an obvious outlier among any animal
killing statistics—least of all those that apply to science.
The hunting of the larger Bryde’s (Balaenoptera edeni),
sei (Balaenoptera borealis) and sperm whales in the
North Pacific, and the plan to expand the scientific hunt
in 2007/2008 in the Southern Ocean to include
humpback (Megaptera novaeangliae) and larger numbers
of fin whales—which are some eight times the body mass
of minke whales—raises even more serious welfare
questions.
4. Recommendations
Alongside conservation implications, animal welfare
considerations are also an important component of the
management of exploitation of wildlife. Several countries
that are members of the IWC have explicitly included
welfare concerns in their policy statements and, as
summarised earlier, the IWC has considered issues
surrounding the humane killing of whales since the 1950s.
Within the IWC, there has been more general agreement on
appropriate conservation targets than on appropriate
welfare targets. This should not however, preclude a debate
on what constitutes acceptable welfare criteria. Just as
debates about conservation targets have included the
consideration of broader international norms, so too
should welfare considerations be viewed in the broader
context of acceptable welfare targets for the use of animals
in science. Unfortunately, the current lack of data does not
allow for an informed debate about welfare and there is
currently no requirement for the whalers to provide
relevant data to IWC.
A first step would therefore be for the IWC to adopt a
binding decision (through an amendment to the IWC
Schedule which would need a three quarters majority or
consensus) requiring certain, agreed data to be collected
and made available from both scientific and commercial
whaling. Our recommendation is that, at a minimum, this
would include the chase time from when the whale is first
sighted, the time to death for each individual whale (rather
than an overall mean), what, if any, secondary killing
methods were used for each whale, struck and lost rates,
and equipment failures such as the failure of the harpoon
grenade to detonate. In addition continuous video data of
the kill, including location of harpoon impact should also
be required.
The current situation is that some data, such as struck
and lost rates, are required by the IWC Schedule. However,
Japan has interpreted these requirements as not applying to
scientific whaling and thus does not provide data. Article
VIII of the International Convention for the Regulation of
Whaling states that the, ‘‘killing, taking and treating of
whales y’’ for the purposes of scientific research is exempt
from other IWC decisions. However, a requirement that
data must be provided does not restrict the killing, taking
and treating of whales and therefore would not be in
conflict with Article VIII. In 1979, the IWC took
independent legal advice over a similar issue, namely the
amendment of the Schedule to require prior review of
proposed scientific permits [27]. The advice indicated that a
requirement for such prior review is permissible within the
Convention and as a result, the IWC adopted this
requirement as Schedule paragraph 30. Thus, it would be
possible to require scientific data to be reported from
scientific whaling programs through an appropriate
amendment to the Schedule.
Although whaling nations perceive that by providing
data they are supplying ammunition to the critics of
whaling, if they do not wish whaling to be judged on the
basis of video material from other sources then they need
to commit to providing adequate data. An informed
debate, and a genuine effort to improve killing efficiencies
if and where whaling occurs, will be a substantial
improvement on the current impasse.
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Please cite this article as: Gales N, et al. Is Japan’s whaling humane? Marine Policy (2007), doi:10.1016/j.marpol.2007.08.004
