Norwegian whaling season has officially ended and resulted in a record killing of 575 minke whales – the highest number of whales killed in the past five years. Last year the kills amounted to 503. Vanessa Williams-Grey, policy manager at WDC, said “This is nothing short of ecocide. Killing hundreds of minke whales is utterly […]
Tag: minke whales
Tourists are driving Iceland’s whale meat trade
Chef Stefan Ulfarsson makes no bones about selling whale meat at his restaurant a short walk from Reykjavik’s tourist strip. Indeed, the owner of the Three Frakkar is so proud of it that he had a striking wooden statue of a whale’s tail in the restaurant garden. The tourists pouring into the seafood restaurant are […]
Japanese whaling ships leave ports to hunt for whales
Two commercial whaling vessels departed on the 10th and 11th of June from the Japanese ports of Shimonoseki and Innoshima to kill up to 187 Bryde’s whales and 25 sei whales. Japan resumed commercial whaling three years ago after leaving the International Whaling Commission (IWC – the body that regulates whaling) and following widespread international […]
Norway to conduct ‘cruel’ minke whale tests despite opposition
Plans to capture and run six-hour-long sound tests on young minke whales are set to go ahead in Norway despite condemnation from more than 50 international scientists and wildlife experts as “completely unacceptable”. According to the plans, approved by the Norwegian Food Safety Authority (NFSA), over one or two seasons a dozen juvenile minke whales […]
Norway Planning Auditory Experiment Using Whales
The Animal Welfare Institute (AWI) and other welfare groups are calling attention to a planned experiment in Norway using captured minke whales, according to an email from Animal Welfare Institute. Organizations are urging the Norwegian Food Safety Authority to revoke an approval that could be harmful to whales. According to permits discovered by AWI, the […]
POLL: Seaspiracy Controversial Documentary: Should marine life be treated as seafood or as wildlife?
If you’re wondering how detrimental eating fish is, sea for yourself: In the new Netflix documentary Seaspiracy, director Ali Tabrizi lays bare how commercial fishing devastates marine animals—and what will happen if humans continue to consume fish. Created by the same team that made the illusion-shattering feature Cowspiracy, Seaspiracy goes below the surface to reveal […]
Petition: Demand Norway Phase Out Whaling
Whales are beautiful, intelligent, majestic creatures. Sadly, hundreds of thousands of them die as a result of bycatch, shipping accidents, plastic pollution, among other man-made issues every year. In 1986, a moratorium from the International Whaling Commission (IWC) banned commercial whaling; however, Iceland, Norway, and Japan refuse to comply. Whaling involves harpooning a whale that […]
‘Minke whales for dinner’: Norway’s controversial whale hunt is still on
Norway plans to kill up to 1,278 minke whales this year, according to a recent announcement made by the country’s fisheries ministry. This is the same quota as the previous two years, although whalers only killed 503 common minke whales (Balaenoptera acutorostrata) in 2020, and 429 in 2019. “Norwegian whaling is about the right to […]