Norway's whaling season opens

On April 1st, Norwegian fisheries authorities published whaling regulations for 2006 and confirmed WDCS’ fears that quotas this year are the highest in decades. The minke whaling season, which opened on April 1st, will allow Norwegian whalers to kill as many as 1052 minke whales and will permit whaling in international waters.

The new regulations give Norwegian whalers the go-ahead to kill minkes not only within Norway’s EEZ and self-declared fisheries zones, but also in international waters; specifically the regulations refer to IWC management areas ES,EB,EW,EN and CM. If the whalers opt to hunt in the EN area, it could bring their lethal harpoons to within 200 nautical miles of the UK coast. A quota of 609 animals has been set for all areas but Jan Mayen and the CM area, for which a quota of 443 animals has been given.

In 2005, the Norwegian whalers fell far short of their total overall quota of 796 animals. This was due, in large part, to their failure to use up the proportion of the quota allocated to the waters near Jan Mayen island, some 620 miles west of the Norwegian mainland. Although only five whales out of the Jan Mayen quota of 145 were killed in 2005, the government is clearly doing everything it can to allow whalers to kill the highest number of whales possible this year by expanding their hunting grounds.

Of further concern, the Norwegian government has made it clear that it will continue to rely on the so-called "blue-box" electronic logbook to oversee its whaling operations, instead of demanding 100% coverage by inspectors, as had previously been the case. WDCS and other conservation organisations believe that, without the control provided by human inspectors, vital information on the welfare of the animals killed, and other important data, will go unreported.

Source: WDCS