How To Protect The Ocean
SUFB 099: Whale Hunting Today Explained By Dr. Chris Parsons
We see news articles about specific countries hunting whales around the world and there doesn't seem to be a good reason for it. We also see the IWC not really doing much about it, so we ask the question: Why?
Dr. Chris Parsons sits is a Marine Mammal Biologist who sits on the Scientific Committee of the IWC and breaks down the science, or lack there of, and the politics involved in the decisions.
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Show Notes:
http://www.speakupforblue.com/session99
Welcome to the speaker for blue podcast session 99 wow 99 episodes. This is fantastic. I'm so happy that the 99th episode is an interview episode today on the program we have Dr Chris Parkins. He's going to break down whale hunting for us what it means to the world today what it what how it started. The political things behind it how science doesn't play as big of a role as we thought. And he's going to break down how the IWC the international whaling commission actually functions and maybe dysfunctions. But we're going to talk all about that today on the speak up for blue podcast. So stay tuned for this great episode. Welcome to the speak up for blue podcast helping you get involved in ocean conservation. And now here's your host loves football so much. I mean he really really likes it Andrew Lewin. Hey everybody welcome back to another exciting episode of the speak up for blue podcast your voice for the ocean. I am your host Andrew Lewin founder speak up for blue dot com marine ecologist and self-proclaimed ocean printer. That's right everything I do in business as an entrepreneur has to do with protecting the ocean and living for a better ocean. Today we've got a fantastic interview coming up it's interview Wednesdays with Dr Chris Parkins who is a second time veteran on the as an interviewer on the podcast he came on in episode or in session 11 you can go to speak up for blue dot com forward slash forward slash session 11 where we talked about marine mammal protections and how policy plays an important role. One of the most retweeted episodes we've ever had that was back in September. So we welcome Dr Chris Parsons back again today before we get into that episode and I describe a little bit more how this interview came to be. I just want to thank our patrons that is Chris and Claire Jefford, Dr Judith Weiss who was the first interviewer interviewee on the speak up for blue podcast and Ron and Judy thank you very much for your your support on this podcast and supporting ocean conservation. If you guys want to support ocean conservation and spreading the word about what issues are facing the ocean and how you can actually stop them how you can reduce eliminate these these issues by implementing solutions you can do so at speakupforblue.com forward slash patreon P A T R E O N okay so that's all I have to say about that let's get into the episode this episode is really a continuation of session 11 because originally when I contacted Chris we want I want to talk about whale hunting and I want to touch a bit upon whale hunting but we realized uh well one when we when we got into our original interview the questions we deviated from the questions and and not still one of the one of the better episodes that we've actually produced here at speakupforblue.com or speak up for blue but we just got sidetracked and we got on to a lot of other issues that we're facing you know policies and marine mammals whales dolphins um porpoises seals sea lions walruses polar bears and all sorts of things and uh and we wanted we never really got to touch upon whale hunting and I'm kind of glad we didn't in a certain way because we dedicate an entire episode this episode to whale hunting now it is one of our longer interviews um but I guarantee it's a good one uh he breaks down he Chris is actually he's actually sits on the science committee of the international whaling commission the whaling commission is essentially um the body that not regulates but sort of hones in on whale hunting and as Chris describes it doesn't use the science as much as it uses politics to really implement solutions regulations um not necessarily sanctions but um risk-lapping type things so it's important that we understand the you know the history of the IWC which Chris breaks down it's important to understand its current function of the IWC which Chris breaks down and where it's going to go in the future um and also how sea shepherd plays a role uh in terms of you know halting or reducing the amount of whaling that actually occurs but also might actually play a role politically in terms of some whaling countries continuing to hunt and we'll find out how that happens um from from Chris in this episode so it's a fantastic episode I highly recommend that you listen to all of it even if you have to listen to it in two parts um it is one of the the better episodes that we've produced even though every guess that we've had is great this is an important issue for a lot of people um because whales are such an iconic species a lot of people have problems with hunting just ethically and they just don't think it should happen at all um Chris says some interesting things in terms of the historic functions of whale hunting where it came from how it really came to be how World War II played a role in it um but yeah it's just amazing like this blew my mind this episode as Chris was talking I didn't expect this the episode to turn this way so thanks a lot to Chris as usual a friend of speakupforblue.com definitely friend of the podcast um and we will definitely have him back a third time um the hat trick as we say in Canada but uh yeah definitely it's it was a great interview I hope you enjoy here is Dr. Chris Parsons on his interview talking about whale hunting and the IWC enjoy hi Chris how you doing welcome back to the speakup for blue podcast and glad to be back yeah it was great you were on uh episode 12 so session 12 and I'll put the links into the on this on this uh on the show notes here but we talked all about marine mammal policy and we talked a lot about marine males in general and how they're managed and how the science is doing on it and of course the there you got some crazies who talk about marine mammals and not so crazies and so forth and we even had your wife Naomi on the show I believe it was the next week or the week after uh and we talked all about sea world and and and animals and kept marine mammals and captivity and how they're better off that how the science says they're better off in wildlife and whatnot uh your show your show was actually the most retweeted show we've had so far to date on this on this podcast so congratulations on that oh that's excellent and you're also another first you're also the first interviewee to come back and do another interview and that was because we didn't finish what we originally set out to talk about I'm very easily distracted I have to say which name you will admit to well I'll tell you what I'm the same way so this time we're gonna focus the whole uh discussion on marine mammal hunting in particular we're gonna really cover whale hunting and then go into other sorts of hunting um how it's perceived what the science says about it and how we how we look at it generally in in the public size and in from a scientific and conservation point of view so we got a lot to talk about before we get into all that let's uh just remind everybody who you are and what you do well my name's uh chris bersons and I'm a professor at george mason university in the department of environmental science and policy which is a very interdisciplinary department we have natural scientists we have social scientists we have policy people um in our department we have the the person who invented the term biodiversity we have the top that's who wrote the marine mammal protection act and the dangerous species act um so it's a it's a nice group of people very concerned it's a sort of real world application of science and uh my background um I've worked for uh well and dolphin NGOs in the uk um I have been in academia now for I don't know nearly 15 years okay um and uh once upon a time I did a phd on uh pink dolphins in bomb one of the most polluted busiest places in the world and uh we thought those animals would go to get extinct but they they still exist there surprisingly and uh hopefully because of some of the conservation we managed to get right put place in there right but uh with respect to whales and well hunting I've been a member of the scientific committee of the international whaling commission since 1999 so we lost that it's um 17 years this year 18 years yeah wow so a long time well that's great because we're going to talk about the the international whale commission because uh the reason why we're going to talk about just later on is I get a lot of feedback from people who have not on the the iwc and I'm certainly I'm not on the iwc and I don't know what goes on uh at those meetings uh which we're going to talk about but they have a bad reputation right now uh and it's mainly because it seems like people I don't know if they're supposed to but people think they're supposed to regulate the hunting around the world and of course the most popular probably actually the two most popular places that for for whale hunting I believe are well with japanese going down to the south south the west ocean so that's what's west pacific ocean and then there's of course I believe it's Norway uh is it open Norway that there's another pilot whale hunting um well pilot whales whether or not they counted underneath the iwc is it right okay indention so that that comes pretty complex well let's give give some background on what the iwc is so this was an organization that was set up in the 1940s so the world was a very different place right um in your second world war coming out of the second world war that's the sort of world um there was a huge amount of whale hunting um particularly because uh dairy products were hard to come by um in the uk there was russianing in japan certainly there was a big with access to food and so whales were hunted just before and during uh just after the second world war for that oil which got turned into margarine that was used in used in tanks and so on but then vegetable oils became more popular and easier to produce mineral oils became easier to get access to and so the need for whale oil really really dropped away right right really by the 1950s it had dropped really substantially um whale as a source of food um has existed in many locations um it's tended to be subsistence form of food so places like Alaska, Siberia and Russia, Iceland and so on where well has been a food a lot of the Nordic countries right consumed well um but really large-scale catching of whales for meats was done by a really done by Japan and to a large extent to Russia as well but certainly for Japan and that was just after the second world war. Japanese agriculture was in ruins most of their ports had been destroyed and the occupying allied forces were really concerned that the Japanese population basically wouldn't be able to feed themselves um America was getting more and more oil from mineral oil and they were extracting it from Texas they knew there were more reserves and um well numbers were starting to decline and um so in fact it was General MacArthur who got it done to the idea that they could basically sell off their whaling boats to Japan and encourage Japan to go out and hunt whales which had been done in some locations in Japan and relatively isolated locations, only a few places but um suggested this could be a possible way for Japan to get food right so that's when Japan got into the whaling game before that Japan really was a very minor player in whaling and it was a lot of the big industrial countries that were engaged in whaling the US, Russia, the UK and so on. So IWC was set up in the 1940s because these whaling nations realized that the numbers of worlds were declining and the industry probably wasn't going to be sustainable. In the 1920s they developed these massive factory ships were almost the size of oil tankers that going all around Antarctica killing vast numbers of whales and that really had an impact on well numbers whereas before that they were kind of restrained by their technology um how far they could travel to catch whales right so they were just decimating well populations around Antarctica in particular so well numbers were decreasing they enacted this international treaty originally it was about 12 countries all who were hunting whales. When they set up the treaty as I said it was all whaling nations to maintain whales as a a viable industry so a lot of the language is written in that sort of way yeah it will be like oh I don't know writing a treaty about coal 10 years ago or something like that right we're realizing that coal's days might be numbered but the lobbyists were really really pushing to try and make coal as sustainable as possible does that make sense yep yep complete sense um so a lot of the language is like that but one of the interesting things about the IWC is they required a scientific committee so they had scientific input and for a long time the number of scientists who were advising the IWC were just a small number of scientists literally a handful of scientists and many of these scientists were scientists who were actually working on whaling vessels collecting samples collecting them on whaling boats so um a lot of these scientists really did have a foothold in the industry they were sometimes sort of industry consultants and then increasingly they were government representatives now the scientific committee of the international whaling commission is a much much bigger group of people and it's about 200 or 300 scientists and the spectrum of scientists is very broad some of them are scientific delegates from countries which bring with them the politics of that particular country right some of them are more independent scientists that don't really have a sort of argument on either side some people are brought in specially for their expertise on a specific issue um the IWC scientific committee used to be all about discussing numbers of wells in different areas and therefore what the quotas should be and so how many wells could be taken but these days um there's a well-watching subcommittee there's a small citation subcommittee there's an environmental subcommittee there's an ecosystem subcommittee um so a lot of the discussions on the science level actually very conservation oriented and for many the other subcommittees they're talking about numbers of animals in different areas there's only a really small amount of the science is related to quotas and numbers and sustainability of whaling so that's a scientific committee the scientific committee then provides a report to the commissioners and the commissioners are uh political appointees and it can really vary by country sometimes um they come from a conservation department sometimes they come from a fishing department sometimes sometimes literally they're an NGO person who went to the government said hey can I represent you at the IWC and they said sure we're gonna pay you so you know as long as you pay the fees and you can go right um no big deal um so it's very variable as to who's representing there's about 90 countries now that are members of the IWC and it can be very polarized so you have some countries which are very fiercely opposed to whaling um there are those which are very fierce proponents of whaling and there's a bunch of countries in between then um the sort of alliances of the countries slightly more than half are um against commercial or scientific whaling right um and slightly under half are pro commercial whaling uh the main countries being Iceland, Japan and a lot of developing countries um that basically vote with Japan and this is where one of the controversies of the IWC occurs yeah um so to have membership of the IWC is basically means tested so if you're a rich wealthy country you pay more in fees but each country has one vote and the vote of China's is exactly the same as say the vote of St Kitts and Nellis right one billion people versus what populations and kids is probably about 40 000 or something yeah um so a lot of small developing nations have been recruited in recent years particularly by Japan and there's actually been studies showing that a lot of these countries have had fisheries aid money that their officials have been offered free education in Japan and various other gifts all of a sudden like a building is built somewhere yeah yeah yeah something a building is constructed there there's even been a somewhat sleazier gifts there was an interview done by one of the British newspapers with an IWC official who at the time actually had a very high position at the IWC and he basically admitted to effectively taking bribes and there were they got on video um about delegates being offered prostitutes and all sorts of really really dodgy yeah things like that and that led to a big to a big scandal absolutely so um the secretariat to the IWC has really been trying to clean things up um within the IWC to try and remove this sort of take I mean it's that these countries still attend and still vote with Japan and they often have to sign a document saying that they will vote with Japan at the IWC in exchange for his fisheries aid money um people will often complain about Japan basically bribing these countries but hey the US does exactly the same thing yeah it's interesting okay yes they can't really put anything too much um so it does have a sort of a sleazy undertone but some of the worst excesses have been clamped down on it it used to be um countries would go in to pay the fees on the day of the meeting and then a Japanese delegate would come down with a brown paper on like full of cash and again his their fees right right um and so you know very sentios and videos of yeah all sort of stuff going on but now the money has to come through official channels it has to be a legit funding from that particular country um so it can't just be a wider cast of your hands i'm sorry you know in the back room or something yeah there's a lot more oversight right to that now well this is this is interesting because i just want to sum it up a little bit uh like the iwc just is what you said so correct me if i'm wrong essentially it originally it was formed to manage whaling and to manage the whale populations to make sure that they can keep whaling sustainably for as long as they could realizing that at one point if they continued at the rate they were going eventually the whale populations would become unsustainable and they wouldn't be able to harvest things um now it's more of a little bit of a political game for you know the countries who want to continue whaling for whatever purpose they want to whale whether it be scientific or commercial um and they will go to really any means or they have in the past to really get their way now this brings me to the question what sort of jurisdiction does the iwc have is this an organization where countries will come together agreed in the 1980s they all everybody agreed or there was a vote to agree not or to ban commercial whaling however japan and other countries continued to do commercial whaling so is this one of those things where it's we agree and then or it was voted to agree in the in the parties that didn't want to agree to it just did it anyway is that what this is that what the question is now this is this is where it gets really complicated okay this is good because this is what i want people to know is i want the audience to know because i know it's not just an easy situation where you know this one body can put in punishments or sanctions against another country for you know doing this kind of thing so this is good i know it's complicated but this is good to listen to well this this is one thing people think well why don't their iwc shut down blah blah country for misbehaving well they it's not like they have a international well police force all right you know it's it's a treaty organization yeah like many treaties you're reliant on the members to abide by the treaty in good faith yeah and there is not anything really put into the treaty that can introduce sanctions the best they can do is really sort of shake their finger and go well that's really we're really disappointed in you yeah you should do you should do better right um which countries have countries have you know they denounce what what Japan and Iceland have been doing in Norway and and but they still do it technically many countries could introduce sanctions right against Japan for going against the spirit of the treaties um but they've really been low to do that and you can see why with Japan being a major trading yeah it is difficult right um if you're buying all your electronics from Japan if they're buying your goods to introduce sanctions it's going to impact those countries far more than the whaling issue does right so at this sort of commission meeting that's where all the politics happens and it's sometimes the arguments are very eloquent and well structured and very diplomatic and sometimes it degenerates into like a primary school playground like you're a big poo poo head so it's a little bit like that right right um as I said the scientific committee provides a report to the commission and they discuss what the scientific committee says but very often though they then completely ignore it um the scientific committee reports something like 600 pages and that gets condensed and then that gets condensed and that gets condensed so what they actually see is a really summarize summary of a summary yeah and then you know the politicians very often don't even read that they're relying the elevator pitch from there from their aid right right so science really doesn't have much role in it and uh so in the scientific committee there's actually some really good conservation there yeah yeah that would imagine that happens because it's a good way of getting 300 scientists together from different areas to argue about something over two weeks and then come up with some language at the end so it's a somewhat more effective than the conference in many ways but anyway that's the different types of whaling so Norway conducts commercial whaling right so that's one category whaling they can go out and hunt whales for profit and the reason that they can do that is when they introduce the ban on the moratorium on whaling Norway um put in a reservation and this is something you can do in international treaties you can sign up to the most of the treaty but you can have a reservation against certain things right this happens it's a convention on the international trade and endangered species for example some countries will sign up for greater conservation status for some species some countries will go oh no i'm going to have a reservation so that species is not on appendix one for us okay um and this happens routinely in international treaties there may be a part of the treaty which is imparitable for that particular country right but to get them to sign up to everything else it's diplomatically tolerated if that makes sense yep so Norway is conducting commercial whaling and is doing so completely legally hmm because they have this reservation they are not bound by the moratorium now scientific whaling this is a clause that was introduced uh decades and decades ago article eight and it says that you can lethally take whales in order for scientific purposes and originally it was intended say a scientist really needed um really needed a sample from a whale they or they needed a skeleton um for some sort of scientific purposes it was intended that maybe they'd be going out taking one or two animals and there's a clause under that if you're taking this animal then you should uh once you've got your samples you could sell the products so the idea being well if you're killing something you should use the entire animal you don't just take you don't just take the skull right and throw the rest of it right overboard yep so it yeah it made a lot of sense um if you're going to kill an animal you might as well use the entire animal so this has kind of been misused and most famously by Japan they go to the North Pacific um around Japanese waters and into Antarctica and they've been taking animals for scientific research purposes and then they process them and they sell them meat on the meat market and that meat that money then goes back into the program although this scientific program is really really heavily subsidized by the Japanese government and it's not economically sustainable um the market for whale meat in Japan is really very low um recently it's been um as i said before it a lot of the whale meat was sort of 1950s um kids used to eat it at the school lunch and it's kind of been kind of a sort of nostalgia food for older Japanese people or an exotic thing oh that's well meat that's kind of it's like frog's legs well that's kind of weird let's try the frog's legs right right um so the market is not very high it's very very heavily subsidized and um so they had been taking animals for scientific purposes and then basically selling the whale meats right i have to have to ask you a question has there been any science publications from Japan from that's that program have you seen any i'm assuming you would know if there'd be any and they'd be presenting at a conference is have there been any of those well there have been well there's a lot of what we would call gray literature they have an internal journal okay but a lot of work is published course uh in terms of international articles in bona fide journals yeah there are a couple but generally they are not really related to the well maybe it's like a microbiology study gotcha um i just had to ask that because you hear it for scientific purposes so you expect that their program would be producing papers or they have a specific monitoring program at least at the very least they'd have something like that but it sounds like you know if it's internal i don't know it doesn't sound very you know very good and then and then it's and then if it's if they if they publish you know 20 papers a year so or 10 papers a year in international you know journals that were very highly highly regarded then and criticized and and gone through the review process then i could understand okay well there's a legitimate it is a scientific program yeah there's occasionally an article comes up and usually it's um something that's not related to the waiting program it's right there's one japanese scientist who does studies on eggs of minky wells okay and then publishes in reproductive biology gotcha journals and so occasionally you see these articles the majority of the publications are in um wailing journals sorry well research journals within japan so in oh okay any respects it's kind of like publishing in your company newsletter yes and then considering that to be a yeah location where you know the guy in the cubicle next to you has reviewed it right for um so it's that sort of level that sort of level of science in fact similar comparison of papers um similar comparisons being made about c-world science with wales to scientific wailing um the sort of the the type of papers that are published and where they're being published yep gotcha um so some of that is coming out um now they are required to present the results to the iwc scientific committee right and this is where some of the issues some of the problems have occurred because when they present at the meeting um when it's written up in the report um is usually portrayed as some scientists critique the science um said the sample sizes were incorrect the methodology was wrong there was no need to kill these animals you could get data with non-lethal methods um and other scientists said these are the best this is the best science since sliced bread right and it's reported in the in the report as some people say this some people say the other what they don't highlight is that those people that are saying it's brilliant can sometimes be the Japanese scientists themselves and um sometimes they're you know these sort of developing country representatives of japan reading some sort of spiel that they've been given it's a little bit like um a high school kid is being graded on an essay and the teacher gives one grade and the kid self-grades themselves right and the teacher goes this is a dsa it's awful the grammars dreadful this is falling and then the student goes oh this is an a essay it's the best essay ever when it goes when it goes to the examination board you can't tell whether or not it's the teacher that said it or it's the student that has basically self-assessed them gotcha gotcha so it's a little bit a little bit like that they have been trying to have um the results go through an independent body again the same sort of thing happens they produce a review they produce a report and they critique it but it's not like submitting an article to a journal they can't turn around and go no this is rubbish we reject it all they can do is critique it that's right and then japan uh japanese government scientists go well we value this critique and you take it into consideration and we will refine our research methodology right wherever appropriate and and really there's nothing they can do with it they can't keep them out they can't say sorry uh we deny the permit and that's the problem they cannot deny the whaling scientific whaling a proposal or they can do is comment on it and that's one of the big problems if they could deny the proposal heck it would have been denied right well and recently there's been news to say that a lot of the countries now have put japan sort of under under the fire about this so-called scientific research yeah and i believe correct me if i'm wrong but didn't they have to didn't they get told to stop the sign with the scientific research which would essentially you know stop their their whaling process and they agreed to it at one point did they not like recently oh yes again this is this is getting into really complicated territory because there was a there was a court case that was primarily australia and put it by New Zealand so went to the international court of justice um so basically sort of un court on this and the ruling was that the scientific research being done um for those who are listening on audio i'm doing quite well so the scientific research being done is uh not proper science and it's not within the spirit of the the treaty right so for a while japan japan japanese government said that they would abide by that um and this only dealt with antarctica it didn't deal with their scientific whaling and in the north pacific around japan it was just an antarctica and one of the key issues is that the waters around antarctica are supposed to be considered to be a um a whale sanctuary right where commercial whaling is banned japan has said well we can we're doing scientific research but should failing so it doesn't count to us so it's a sort of legal loophole anyway the the court ruled japan originally said that they were going to abide by this um and this is where um things like c-shirt that start yeah by being and make things ish a problem there's actually a lot of people with in japan law the japanese scientists were quite happily scientific whaling to disappear dickley the younger scientists who want to have an international career they want published yeah um they want to go to conferences and be considered as be a real scientist right and the whole scientific whaling thing is kind of embarrassing them and also a lot of people in the government it costs a vast amount of money i mean they're subsidizing this yeah tune of sort of 25 30 000 dollars a sorry million dollars a year right so i so i started to rub this is my question that i have to you and i've been asking this for a while is why are they continuing it you say that the the demand has decreased just because yes you know there's there's a lot of alternatives right now the japan is doing actually quite well you know as a country in terms of economics and they've always done well since after the 1940s and after the hardships that they went through um the the the the program seems not to be able to sell that much meat it's highly subsidized so why do they continue it if they're they're pumping money into something that's not and this is where we come to the crux debates it's all to do with politics and saving face um in asia saving face is a big thing yes to be embarrassed right it's a really really big thing and in the country is hierarchical um it japan makes downton abby look like a bunch of it really does um and um this this is where the sort of sea shepherds thing comes in because sea shepherd after this ruling had been made so japan was initially abiding by it and said that they would acquiesce to this and there was a big sigh of relief five hundred oh good we don't spend all this money we could put this later you know something we actually want to do right and because it's this international court case it's been us versus our major trading partner australia so it's like peer to peer yep there's been a independent facilitator that's agreed with our peer it's like going to i suppose um i don't know marriage counseling or something like that the marriage counselor yeah blah blah yeah your wife is actually correct you're being a bit of a douche right yeah okay okay fine i hate myself yeah oh yeah i'll listen so it's a little bit like that yeah yeah then the likes of sea shepherds start going well we've been in japan and we've won sea shepherd has been officially brat uh considered to be a terrorist organization in japan yes because of then um getting involved in ramming boats and sabotaging boats and so on so the mighty japanese government has been beaten by a teeny tiny uh organization that they have labeled terrorists so it would be like the american government having been beaten oh i'd say an american government uh that's led by donnell trump i've been being beaten by a teeny tiny little terrorist organization that doesn't even have guns yeah that's one by sort of throwing um literally this is a sea ship does they throw rotten butter and they they tangle up um tangle up propellers and things like that so that's that's how they do it that's that's hilarious so they just sort of harassment you know it's like they've been beaten by terrorists who've been doing the equivalent of throwing paper bags full of dog poop white house and so the japanese government has been hugely embarrassing right um and the japanese government is very right wing and the right wings are the right uh the japanese government are really white wings so um very patriotic too right um so they have been beaten by this terrorist organization so it's a huge dent to national pride um and there are a lot of people in japan um so particularly this is the older members of the right who have had their national pride massively dented for decades because of after the second world war yeah um japan has to play ball with all these countries that were previously against in the war because they're major trading partners and to a certain extent wailing is something where japan can kind of flex its diplomatic muscles and be kind of a dick to these countries which they were previously opposed to but today they have to play ball on international treaties um you know militarily they're aligned with them trading they're aligned with them um so this is one of the few places where they can really kind of get back on these countries uh and really sort of flex their patriotic muscles it's a little bit like some of the extreme rhetoric that's happened in the u.s from hard ride you know so things like the war against christmas yes yes i don't know the the snowflake on the starbucks you know these sorts of ridiculous things like how dare starbucks not have a snowflake on the cup it's uh something that they can get impassioned about yeah can actually be a real pain but it doesn't really mean anything on the larger international stage and unfortunately a bunch of it comes in right no it is and unfortunately though it just seems like it's the stubbornness from both sides right you've got a country who's worried about its pride and i understand that uh but you also have this little teeny organization who wants to puff up its chest and say hey look we did it you know and that'll get them more funding and that'll get them more prestige if they can get prestige but from their followers and say oh wait you know c shepherd is doing something and they're doing something probably and they will get funded for the future so it almost seems if both of them just said okay let's just let bygones be bygones you guys stop we'll stop whales are safe unfortunately it's the other way around you know they're both being both being stubborn really uh and and and you know the whales are paying for it right yeah so let's talk about the actual sorry to interrupt i just want to talk about the actual sustainability of this hunt now i know japan says they they abide by quotas or i don't know if they set up themselves or who sets them for them but they have a quota of certain amount of minky whales and i believe that there's some other whales involved in that as in whales in whales that's right yeah a bunch of spaces in north pacific right and i think the for the minky for some reason i remember there's usually about three hundred that they allow or that that that that they take essentially and sometimes they meet their quota sometimes they don't from a science scientific perspective what like a lot of countries have stopped you know hunting a few have from from a scientific point of view are these still sustainable since it's only one or two countries that are doing this there's a science show anything about that or are those populations still decreasing well there's there's some debates about sustainability in some locations where it's where it's going on what japan is talking about taking from Antarctica is about three hundred and something Antarctic minky whales right the number of minky whales in Antarctica there's some controversy okay if one of the so compiler surveys decades ago now estimated nearly a million about seven hundred and eighteen thousand okay that's not it minky whales then a more recent survey the next survey estimated about three hundred thousand so it was a really big decline within a basically a ten year window yeah technically the iucn should be listing Antarctic minky whales as endangered because suddenly there's a lot less whales and recent surveys do seem to back up the number is much lower probably about a quarter of a million Antarctic minky what somewhere in that region so why was there this big decline so it could be because of climate change there's certainly a shift in minky whale distribution okay they're very much associated with ice edge habitat okay um so it might be related to that there's an argument that they're competing with humpback whales which are increasing in numbers cruel numbers are decreasing around Antarctica so then there may be a climate change issue going on there right um it may just be that the older surveys were just really inaccurate right and which happens it does happen um so that's kind of some that's kind of like an elephant in the room perhaps these other surveys weren't really as good right um and perhaps the more recent surveys with more international scientists and more rigor perhaps they're more accurate but certainly there's stuff going on in Antarctica so if you were being precautionary um you would say well hey let's let's try and find out what's going on here because if they are having a catastrophic decline we need to find out why because you know if these animals are endangered we need to work out it so so the conservation people are kind of viewing it like that this is we really need to get a grip on why this is happening and of course no one's really willing to mention the elephant in the room about the old surveys being bad because some of those scientists that did those surveys are still members of the IWC so you're basically saying hey you're sucks yeah yeah um so again there's some sort of uh some politics going academic politics going on there but and even with a quarter of a million minky wells or even a hundred thousand minky wells three hundred animals yeah I'm just putting the math in my head that's yeah it's probably not going to have a huge dent in it if those numbers are in fact correct uh and there's a lot of extrapolation that's being done okay um if the animals really are in decline so there's there's a lot of ifs and but from the sheer numbers you could probably argue that 300 animals is likely to be sustainable right if they're not all taken in one location if they're not all taken from one stop and that's another issue so are there different stocks where the locations are coming from yeah because I think the one thing we we often fail to sort of have a good grasp on is how big the area they are they are actually hunting it they're not just hunting in a specific area they're probably hunting all around especially if they're being chased by by you know some boats so you know that that plays into a part two is you know we always think it's a small area yeah there's there's different locations and they're always talking about sort of area one and every four and but Japan tends to go more for certain areas because economic leads cheaper to get to right right you're not traveling around I mean logistically it's a tough place to work in Antarctica yeah it is huge area um the distance from the Antarctic Peninsula to South America is like teeny tiny right on an app but that's like a two-day sale yeah yeah to get um to go across the people passage so it's um it's really is a massive area um so just on the sheer numbers four minky wells it probably is sustainable but you have to be precautionary because of all these other issues which aren't necessarily being addressed if they are matte if they are declining by 50 percent every 10 years oh yeah that's a huge and climate change is happening that that is something where you want to put a bit of caution in right and also they are taking some animals which are considered being endangered by the IECM like fin whales which you don't really know much about um and they keep talking about taking a quarter of humpback whales right but really then it's probably more a case of humpback whales seem to be recovering um but countries get very impassioned when you start talking about killing humpback whales so it's probably more of a political bargaining chip right than anything else yeah and I bet you whenever they talk about humpback whale hunting there is some treaty meeting coming up that's to do with fishery quotas that they're going to use it as a bargaining chip particularly against countries like Australia yeah um UK US well okay we'll take the humpback whales off of our program but give us some more tuna you know but yeah so it's that's another aspect politically it's used as a bargaining chip right but really so science plays very little part in this whole thing it's all very politics related and at the scientific committee one of the things that really irritates the scientists there is how blatantly bad and scientific the scientific whaling proposals are right yeah well yeah and that just drives people absolutely crazy and the fact that politically you have to go yes well thank you for this proposal i'm going to now use it in the washroom to wipe myself because that's what it's worth you know it says there's a lot of that and it and quite frank i feel i feel for some of the the younger japanese government scientists who have to go through this whole charade right and whenever well-meaning people come in and say well like let's discuss about the scientists and sustainability he kind of missing the point it's it's nothing to do with science yeah and quite frankly if they just take all the politicking out of the scientific committee and let the scientific committee talk about well-watching and lots of action they could actually do some really good stuff there it's all about politics and it's all this underlying politics to do with nationalism to do with political bargaining chips to do with to do with a lot of other stuff that has zero to do with science and often zero to do with whales now is this the same for all types of whale harvesting like in iceland and norway and things like that is it seems sort of uh sort of story where there's not a lot of science being put into it it's more of a cultural thing and we want to preserve our culture and this is what we do so you know that that's it oh yes and norway and iceland are very interesting um very different locations norway uh the whale hunting in Norway is very heavily subsidized and the areas where they do the whale hunting it tends to be uh sort of converted fishing boats agate kind of supplementing their income okay and it's more almost like a sort of welfare program okay um new hump whales um there's also sort of political side of it that the whales are eating all our fish if you kill the whales same way that seals often get blamed for declining fisheries if you kill the seals well this is what happens in canada yes yes seals are eating all the fish if they kill the seals the fan come back for you for getting the fact that marine ecosystems don't actually work like that and are a lot more complicated right um so it's kind of a sort of social welfare scheme really it's a way of the the government subsidizing these places without actually giving them welfare making them do something that they can then pay them way more than the market value and keep there cool so it's um it's sort of a sort of a partly pride thing people who wouldn't take welfare will take a very very heavily subsidized uh because at least they feel they're doing something that they're doing something yeah and you see that in failing agricultural communities you see that in failing um primary industries and so it's a very fun thing it's a and it's a very very political yeah um with Norway that's kind of what's going on in iceland it gets even more complicated okay and now this this gets so arcane so iceland's there is one company that does whaling and owned by a guy who is a one of the richest people in iceland okay iceland is a really really small place yes yes really really small place um and again iceland fiercely independent patriotic big community i mean they're up there on the edge of the arctic circle isolated yeah very long strong culture um pharaoh islands is very very similar place and a lot of the issues that they have are similar to that it's the iceland but uh in iceland there's basically one company that does the whaling um they originally left the iwc okay um and we're basically told legally that they could not take whales unless they rejoined the iwc because it's considered to be the international body for regulation of whaling uh so they came back in and they wanted to have a reservation like Norway right so they never had a reservation when they first signed up to the whaling band coming back they wanted a reservation like Norway did um and there was a vote whether they could do that and it was held at a sort of intersessional meeting of the iwc where not everyone was attending okay and it was pointed they said well iceland's already paid its fees um so they had to vote whether an iceland could be a member and the vote passed by one and after the votes had been processed they realized that iclands had actually voted for itself and of course it did even though it wasn't actually a member right right so some countries don't actually recognize iceland as being a member because yeah it it was this just sort of big mess so in other words it was a tie and they they were the tiebreaker and they were the tiebreaker and they voted for themselves and it's almost laughable yeah it is well that's why i love it because it's just like i think i think my kids who are 6 and 8 play that way so honestly i did you see they don't really have they then they didn't really have a sort of legal counsel that can help out it's the the secretary um the new secretary has really tried to clean things up yeah yeah um since since then but it was really kind of uh kind of embarrassing so many countries don't recognize them i didn't issue i'm sorry i i feel i don't know why i'm saying this because it's not very scientific but i feel that a rock paper scissors game should have been put in place for that kind of reason sorry to interrupt i just that that was in my head well the fact that it was done in this sort of inter-sectional meeting yeah personal enough but the fact that they basically fight themselves so yeah it is it's really bad um so originally Iceland was scientific whaling right what Japan was doing and then they just started commercial whaling because they have the reservation because really they they weren't getting much international pushback apart from a couple of countries and just went ahead with it as i said literally it's one country and this is kind of where sea shepherd comes in as well because the guy who runs his company one of his boats was sunk by sea shepherd back in the 1980s right and so he has a personal he's not making money out of this no well doesn't sound like anybody is really is everything subsidized he just has this personal hatred against sea shepherd and their likes and he is basically subsidizing it with all his other companies to do this whaling to it's it's his personal quest it's like the cock brothers in the u.s. putting vast amounts of money into climate change denial right he has the money um he hates these angios he's gonna throw money in he's gonna keep whaling going uh just because it's a really personal thing for him particularly after one of the boats was with sun and Iceland is such a small place that really affected the sort of patriotic side you know this some came in sunk one of our fishing boats it could have killed one of our fishermen yeah um yeah oh absolutely i mean it's a very violent way to uh advocate i guess and to say no we don't want you to do this uh and i've said it for years it's dangerous for um for both sides for both ships that get rammed uh sea shepherd and the country ship who is getting rammed and uh and you know you almost wonder and it seems like it's the same in both situations for Japan and Iceland uh that if sea shepherd backed off and said look you know we we understand your reservations if you are just doing this to get back at us if they really love what they did and they trusted i guess the biggest thing is trust but they would just say okay you know what we're not going to do it as long as you don't do it you know and then and then we'll be fine i don't know if that would work but it seems like the logical thing to do if and i don't i don't mean to bash sea shepherd but it seems though as though they're continuing something that is getting other countries and like entire countries banning together using them as a solidarity method and the sea shepherd's really trying their passion and their mission is to protect these animals they really want to protect them maybe right now they've they've said that they what they could do could be damaging to the you know the hunt and they it is obviously but then if they back off maybe the other countries will just be like okay you know what we don't need to do this anymore i don't need to spend this money and all this time on this because it's really not worth my while yeah whether that will happen i don't know you know who knows yeah unfortunately it's kind of like picking at a wound right that that should have just been left to heal right um and you know sea shepherd has done some things which have led to great conservation benefits uh yes uh you know chasing illegal trawlers around the ocean to highlight legal trawling and things like that and they're they're helping the Mexican government now to patrol the quido right the keeter which is yeah fantastic i mean that's a brilliant and it really needs to be done um but if they'd have just said okay we're we're gonna back off yeah and said maybe we'll we'll we'll give you uh we'll give you like three years and um before we'll say anything yeah before we'll come back or decide whether we need to come back or not yeah and then i think that would have really i think that would have worked so there's other people who really wanted to get out of whaling and then they yeah it's it's interesting that that's where it's that's where it's come that's what it's come to you know that's where we're at right now it's neither side really wants to do what they're doing but they're not gonna they're not going to be the first ones to back down so you're just kind of like oh okay i understand and in um japan i think it would politically been easier to do whereas with iceland i said it's just this one guy yeah who basically self-fund this um he's also related to a whole bunch of high-placed people in the ice lighting governments so it's and everyone knows everyone and what's just such a small place yeah i mean it's it's a really small community so it's it's really tough to deal with in iceland the tourist industry is really against the whaling industry because it's affecting affecting them absolutely affecting more people in iceland by people not going to iceland's um well-watching well i was gonna i was gonna ask that question actually is you know we've seen in other species and i'm sure it's the same for this species in the in the literature that they've proven that the economics of an ecotourism industry so basically so say let's say for the shark it's much more valuable alive the dead same with sea turtles and i'm sure there are some with mammals i don't know of any offhand but i'm sure there are with mammals you're in a country that is very small uh and it i know iceland especially in the last say ten years have really you know brought their their their tourism industry up you know there's a lot of flights that go i think there was was it i think recently they're starting now they have direct flights from iceland to the states and to canada and and it's cheaper and and everything like that and yeah there's there's a really cheap um icelandic flight to rickavick rickavick's a big party place yes yes so yeah so you go and like party on answering rickavick and then come back to new york right um and it'd be a great to go as like from a from a tourist perspective and see the wildlife and see how beautiful this country is and and i think it would it would almost and like i can see that whaling industry being opposed or the ecotourism industry being opposed to the whaling issue because you're killing off their what people are there to watch right and and that can be a big problem and there is a huge amount of opposition from the tourist industry within iceland um unfortunately they're although they they may actually be a major employer particularly locally where you know the tourists will then go to the pub they'll stay in the b and bs yeah of the the local bus service they'll be providing seats there they are going against a multi-millionaire he has money to put into and and it seems like connections to the right type of people to the right people yeah so that they're not really being able to lobby right in the same sort of way and fishing is a huge industry yeah and this guy's really really integrated with the fishing industry and he produces nets for the fishing industry right he could really cause big big waves so you're it's the tourism industry which is small but developing but provides quite a lot of local employment and many icelanders but rather be working in the tourist industry than working in the fishing industry yeah it's it's a nice yeah it's a nice industry to work in absolutely um so there's a lot of internal conflict there and there's also conflict with NGOs some NGOs promotes well-watching in iceland and try and get people to go there to to support the tourist industry whereas others are calling for boycotts so you end up having a mixed message with the NGOs yeah people go thinking that they're supporting the tourist industry but then that will be spun by hey we're wailing and yet still we get all these tourists coming so you can well and watch wells at the same time you can watch well get hunted and shoot it and eat it well yeah yeah so it's amazing i mean it's um a lot of competing NGOs there's a mixed message and if the NGOs just came together to work on that proper strategy um they could really get coordinated in iceland right but um yeah it's it's again it's it's just down to one person wailing will die out with when that guy that guy basically retires and dies right right uh and then it's probably not going to get taken up again it's not going to get taken up it's just that that's sort of one guy he's really really pushing it right but um you really have to understand the internal politics and there's a lot of people from outside saying you should do this and you should do that and everyone wants to support the tourist industry because you know they're making they're helping try and promote wells for conservation right but if you boycott you're financially impacting all these really great people absolutely so it's it's really really complicated pharaohs is very kind of similar to iceland's the pilot well hunt there which many people consider that the idbc doesn't have a dominion over because they're not technically large wells right although in the treaty technically they can have dominion over it um with the pharaohs again really really small community and NGOs from the outside portraying the pharaohies as butcher absolutely as as as stupid in breads which i've i've seen you're just going to alienate the community because here everyone is going to be related to someone who is has been involved with the well hunt yeah so you're calling you know uncle uncle span an inbred butcher yeah oh no for sure uh so you're gonna you're gonna lose the audience so the way to go for someone like the pharaohs would be to work with the community work with the people who have concerns and provide them with the information that they need the resources that they need to cause a grassroots internal change because there's a lot of people who don't want to be doing the pilot well hunt right he wants to have tourists come to the pharaoh islands it's like scotland it's a beautiful place yeah um you can have loads of people going there um for holidays and so on and they're they're not yeah no it's it's true and it's this is this is interesting i'm really glad you know you you came on the program today because i learned a whole lot because you know for me as a scientist it's more of okay so what does the science say and okay so this is what the science says perfect now how do we inform you know the policymakers and and politicians and and things like that that's how it normally works right that we you know we see a problem or it's detected in the science and then we you know we bring it to policy and then we try and prove that situation here it seems it's like it's just politics butting against politics different countries butting against different countries or many countries uh sort of not physically but sort of verbally attacking others and and then you have NGOs that are verbally attacking others and in a world that we live in today where it's so easy to do that whether it be on social media or through other means tv and radio and all that stuff it's easy to do that when let's be honest you've seen it and i've seen it the best way to really make changes to work with the people who are involved with a hunt or people who are involved and work with them to either provide alternatives or come up with some kind of succession if they want to get out of that succession this is one one great thing about well-watching the well-managed well-watching that's done sustainably that has a good education program that's well-monitored great alternative way of using wells as a financial resource which is sustainable i mean well-watching does have an impact it does check change behavior it can stop animals from feeding right but there are many things you can do to minimize that absolutely there are very yeah and and those and those have been documented worldwide as well and and people have and and well-watching operators tend to mostly i would imagine uh abide by those and and the people who are involved what you know it's it's like it's their own best interest to make sure that those wells are going to be there next time so they don't get too close or you know don't try and inhibit their behavior and and so forth and a lot of countries have very strict regulations it's like the u.s and whatnot the long established well-watching industries do tend to be basically self-policing and often the ones that are interested in trying to best themselves although again you often get politics where if someone says well you're impacting the whale there's kind of a a sort of a no but i love my whales i'm not impacting the whales yeah so they get very very defensive rather than going okay perhaps i do do better so again it's how people approach if scientists who are working on well-watching talk to the operators game you know you've got a good business here but if you just do this this this and this it could be better right um rather than going you know you're hurting wells absolutely bad thing yeah and then people get defensive and it goes across all these all these different issues um before before i forget there's another type of whaling okay which i haven't really touched on and that's what's called Aboriginal or subsistence whaling right so these are areas where there has been a long tradition of hunting whales as a food resource and for many these types of Aboriginal whaling most of the NGOs um don't really get involved there are a couple of locations where they do but for most places they don't because um in terms of the absolute numbers well if you're taking 50 bowhead whales um those bowhead populations in Alaska are well monitored the numbers probably are sustainable yeah um these communities i don't know if you've ever been up to someone like Barrow Alaskan and they're in the middle of nowhere and seriously um these are communities as well where there have been thousands or tens thousands of potentially millions of years where um they have had a very high marine mammal meat diet so literally these these populations are adapted to having a diet with a hyper portion of fat yeah um that would probably destroy our arteries oh yes um yeah you know if they if they don't have this diet then they can have problems with diabetes and so on so there have been various studies showing that there is a distinct nutritional need and there have been arguments that there have been there is a cultural need yeah as well um so in several locations where this happens that the NGOs tend to just pack off yeah and for most that most began geo's quite frankly there are you know bigger issues like the Keter and yeah um uh impact of seismic surveys on whales and so on which they could be better spending their time arguing rather than yeah but there's a couple of locations where there are controversies one being Greenland where there's been arguments of our how sustainable the takes are and also that they have been selling meat in um supermarkets and to tourists um and exporting it internationally and the controversy there is well if you have so much surplus that you are selling it to tourists right it's you're going against yeah um the intention of assessing which actually can annoy the other aboriginal communities it makes them look bad um so at the very least you should be reducing your quota yeah and to and to me I was saying most of the time like I've been up to a nuvik in Canada yeah in what Northwest territories it's beautiful but you're right it is isolated a lot of times the land is just pure white you know in the winter and uh it's harsh they do that's what they they live off that but they also they're very careful of how they hunt you know they only take what they need when they use they use everything it's not a wasteful practice just as our fisheries tend to be you know when it gets commercial uh they do it for their own community you know they do it for themselves they do it to feed because they need to it's not because they choose to they need to I mean there may be some people who do choose to but for the most part it tends to just feed themselves and I've talked to to a few people who you know they said I remember one guy telling me I know it has nothing to do with marine mammals but he said he would fish for like 30 minutes and catch arctic char but he would catch like 20 massive arctic char but he would bring it home for the elders to eat he would take what he needed and then he would give the rest to the elders because they couldn't you know fish or hunt anymore so that that's how they live so you know yeah places where it's it's monitored it's done sustainably it's not being wasteful yeah most NGOs would just say yeah this is this is part of the culture this is um an important part of their diet and it becomes less controversial yeah where controversy has crept in is the well-killing methods yes where modern methods are more humane right but they're not traditional right and again I think most people would argue hey if you're using a traditional wooden canoe with a wooden spear that's bad for the well and bad for the hunters yeah absolutely yeah it's dangerous especially if you're up in the yarding you do not want to fall in that water I'm going to tell you that right now absolutely so again that tends to be less controversial that there was a hunting uh washington state um in the Olympic Peninsula with the macar right at that oh that that is very complicated yeah that particular hunt and most of the arguments there relate around about whether or not that is actually subsistence wailing right because the macar had a history of hunting whales but um it's kind of stopped in the 1920s so the argument that it's nutritionally important is much harder to make right and then there's also arguments about um the safety of it the sort of methods they use um the sustainability in the particular population so it gets very very very complicated I can imagine yeah um my wife and I actually very good we're good friends with the the guy who represents the macar at the IWC right um and she often um you know has our has a sort of professional argument right with him about the various different things and with the macar issue but hey we go out drinking with him yeah yeah yeah um I got a friend of his to write a section in my textbook on the macar point of view um for aboriginal wailing um and so they can actually have a really healthy dialogue well I think that's that's it so yeah that's the important part is once we understand where where the hunters are coming from then you understand okay how to approach the problem and come up with some sort of solution if it's possible yeah and now you understand when it comes to aboriginal uh hunting it's very it's it's a deep rooted issue it's very complicated and a lot of governments tend not to touch it they tend to just even because they're mostly sustainable and it's substantive it's kind of hunting it's not like crazy commercial where you say you know in greenland it can become controversial because it gets it's going more towards you know money-making scheme than then just self-senses um but that's it I mean that's an issue that we'll leave for another time because that is there's a lot of ethics in there and there's a lot of history and the poll we talk about political with with just like countries now I can just imagine what that would be absolutely I mean the I mean just I mean the way the american government has treated the american population there's been a horrendous and so part of that is tied up in that the the history absolutely same with chaos the same way treaty treaty rights and oh it's you know wounds which are still bleeding so it's it's really really complicated yeah but I think that's a good example where here we have at the IWC the representative from this group hanging out with the conservationist yeah and um you know if there is an issue we can have a respectful dialogue about it okay we get where you're coming from we completely sympathize here is where we're coming from yeah if you can address that everything you know we will we'll back off we won't have a court case we won't do this we won't do that yeah um so you can have a really good dialogue and where everyone can win win yeah no absolutely I think it's uh you know I this is interesting this whole conversation because we talked a lot about politics and how and even just some of these little issues that get in the way of a big problem um and I think it's good that you know the speaker for blue audience knows this and and myself too because these things become very complicated and it's all about the way we approach it as a country as an international body a scientist as conservationist and I think it's it's very important because you know you have examples of uh I'm gonna say more to the extreme such as um sea shepherd who want to enforce you know rather than than then do it all through the government which from a conservation perspective we understand that because enforcement in an in national waters or even other countries waters is very difficult even in our own country it's very difficult so just have someone go out there and do that to understand well but to get to a point where they're wailing just because you're trying to stop them and then you wonder who's out for what you know I mean it becomes a little bit childish and a little bit uh you know too much politics and where the whales are suffering for the kind of thing and one thinks that politics can't be childish just look at the american elections yeah take a serious look because it's hard to but yeah no and I think it's just um yeah sorry let's let's kind of wrap this up uh and and because this has been just amazing um and we've got new normal normally we try to do an hour we're going on an hour and twenties one of our longer ones in fact in fact actually the the other previous longer one was was your wife Naomi because there's just so much talk about on these issues um and especially wailing and of course you know whale captivity with with Naomi so um but I really want to say thank you and just if do you have any last sort of like a summary kind of thing of saying briefly that you could say that you know for people to kind of think about um yeah I think a couple of things would be to to a scientist a scientist often look at things in just sort of the numbers is it sustainable is it's not sustainable it's a lot more common like to quote facebook it's complicated and you really had to look into those complexities first so I would advise for anyone doing conservation in an area get your social scientists to talk to all the stakeholders first to find out what the underlying politics is because if you've come in there and go I'm a scientist I have come to help you this is what you need to do the argument's probably not to do with science uh it's probably because what Fred said about great arty gertrude's vase that they gave them at christmas you know and all these sorts of feuds it's it's like Romeo and Juliet yeah you know the Capulets and the Montague's are so few that non-conique remember whether feuds right happened but they just know they hate them absolutely so you need to find out what's going on in the various different groups and if you want to try and solve that problem you need to have mutual respect so you need to talk to both sides and to try and find some common ground where you can actually go forward yeah and maybe you can find something that each side will acquiesced it but first of all you have to get through all these political and sort of identity and historical barriers and deal with them and as i was saying to someone the other day one of the best things to do is go out and have a lot of drinks and go karaoke and you know any conservation meeting instead of just getting a bunch of scientists together to argue about the issue spend the weekend first go hiking right do a little bonding beforehand yeah some team building exercise go paintballing or something go karaoke have a lot of years meet with everyone's families right yeah it's much harder to be as much harder to be a dick to someone yeah where they've been on your team in a soccer match true you know if you've been duetting over behemian rhapsody and had a few drinks and if you've had some common ground if if your kids go and play together yeah oh for sure absolutely it makes it a lot easier to yeah to interact and then spend that weekend and then consider that to be an important part of the process and then come on monday morning hey joe hey bop okay right now let's talk about yeah what the issue really is and first of all let's hear from you what your concerns are and particularly what the underlying you're sort of underlying values and your underlying concerns on a science from the science right then we'll talk about the science right yeah yeah no that's that's perfect i think that's a good way to end this interview because that's it seems like it's a one-on-one to talk to people you know like it's it's like yes this is how we talk to people but it doesn't happen often and that when it does you get some success out of it and that's the key right and uh it's just uh it's it's common one-on-one relationship building and and uh you know this stuff is not going to get um these issues are not going to be solved in a day or a night or a weekend it's going to take some time but at any NGO that says oh yeah we can fly and we can fix this yeah no and that's just yeah that's never worked long time it's a long time exactly and though the conservation organizations who do end up spending a lot of time with the country or with a stakeholder they end up having the the better success in terms of getting a lot of their concerns addressed and maybe switching some things to benefit the the stakeholder in the end so i think it's a great way to to and interview chris i really appreciate you coming on and just i love the fact that you just like i'm going to tell it how it is i'm going to tell you straight up this is it and this is like we just got uh we just got schooled on whale hunting around the world like we we hit almost every part of the world which was awesome uh because we haven't even got into uh polar bears and tripy hunting man that's kind of a whole different that's the next episode boyfriend you will be the first to come back for a third interview i'll get into that but i mean these are issues that people have a lot of uh you know i have a lot of concern about and and we hear about it all the time but we don't necessarily the fact of it that you broke down the iwc for us we a lot of us i didn't know a lot about the iwc what goes on what their jurisdiction was if they had one all this and now we know and this is really important to know because you have to get informed on these issues before you can even whether you're judging or you're helping out this is the way it works so it's a lot of background you've got to look into is it translate to any conservation ratio you don't just drop in there and say i'm going to fix this there's a lot of background research you have to do and find out about it and the iwc is a really good uh case study yes this sort of really polarized issue yeah that's um you know someone listening to this podcast who's a political science major or something it extrapolates to what's going on in the us at the moment absolutely it's it's very similar issues you're not going to get those polarized groups together no so if you wanted work on Capitol Hill yeah same principles yeah yeah absolutely the same principle's just different topic that's really what it comes down to so Chris i just want to thank you very much i appreciate you coming on the show again and it's been a lot of fun um it's a great way for us to get to know each other too so so that's awesome just stay on for just a little bit and we'll just chat about how it's going to work after but again thank you very much for coming on the podcast oh it's been a pleasure it's been a pleasure all right we'll talk to you later bye bye okay thanks didn't i tell you that was mind-blowing i just thought that was amazing what amazed me what Chris was saying was that science didn't really play that much of a role usually when we talk about hunting we talk about fishing you know there's stock assessments you know they want to make sure that the stock is actually sustainable and i know it's hard for people to hear whales as a stock because a lot of people just don't think whales should be hunted i understand that i completely understand that but when you talk about some sort of harvest like you do have like you have a deer and you have a moose and all sorts of different hunting prey i guess you could say or game prey uh you would have a stock and and scientists would you know look at the stock and say okay this is sustainable if you only take this amount of whales and whatnot however the idwc has essentially garnered wailing as you know just it's a moot point it doesn't matter anymore there's there's no reason why you need to there's alternatives to its products and it seems as though there are some countries that just continue to do it to get back at some of the NGO's including c shepherd because they don't want to say they lost to this NGO and they don't want the NGO to say hey we beat this country or we beat this you know this fishing fleet or harvesting fleet whatever you want to call them wailing fleet because of our efforts and so fund us more because we're going to continue to do that i really i have mixed opinions about c shepherd i don't like the way they use violence to actually get things done but i understand some of the frustrations with enforcement that we have and i think sometimes they're doing a good thing they're down in uh mexico right now in the sea of quartes protecting the vaquita making sure that the vaquita which is almost extinct it's on the verge of being extinct under a hundred individuals they're they're enforcing the rules there of no gill net use to to harm um vaquita so uh you know depending on how they go about that i think that's great because you know government bodies have very difficult challenge to overcome in providing enforcement so on the other hand you know like c shepherd's doing some good things there but on the other hand you know at some point some people could say that politically some countries are still wailing because they don't want to say they lost the c shepherd even though you know they just don't use wailing anymore in japan wailing is highly subsidized so that means it's not really an economic gain for the people who use it the government is actually supporting this it's propping it up to make it look like it's needed even though it's not um so it'll be interesting to see what happens in the future with that um and maybe more education in uh japan within you know that its citizens to say hey do you really use whale meat do you really use whale oil anymore um that that remains to be seen it's where it's working in china with shark fin soup so we'll see if it works in japan if people are out there educating in in japan and educating the public to say hey you know what we actually don't need to whale hunt you know so we'll see how that works out um in japan in iceland where the tourism industry is kind of taking over for whale watching uh near ecotourism industry and and wailing may not actually be a problem anymore and with this billionaire or whoever owns all the the wailing and fishing fleets who has a lot of power in the government whether he decides to stop or eventually when he passes on whether his the next in line his can or or the next person in line decides that hey this is actually a battle worth fighting for or not you know it all depends so unfortunately it's left up to a few individuals um and whether they decide to stop being stubborn and just say hey let's just look out for the whales because it's so unfortunate the whales are actually feeling this they're the ones being killed and perhaps unnecessarily so i just thought this was a great interview just opened my mind to the political side of dealing with environmental issues uh usually as a scientist like hey what does the science say and in this point it doesn't even look like the science is actually you know playing a part playing a role in the decisions being made so that i found quite interesting a little disappointing but quite interesting um and hopefully wailing will be stopped around the world at some point soon um but unfortunately i just don't know if it's going to i really don't uh so yeah what are your thoughts let me know go to speakupforblue.com/session99 let me know in the comments your thoughts on whether whales are actually going to you know you know whales the whale hunting is actually going to stop anytime soon if you think that's going to happen and how you think we should go about it so um thank you very much to chris parsons dr chris parsons for coming on the episode again and explaining all this breaking it all down i really appreciate it and the speakupforblue community appreciates this um speaking of which if you want to support the ocean conservation initiatives that we are doing by raising awareness of ocean issues educating the people in the ocean and species and implementing and helping people influence solutions uh to reduce uh or eventually eliminate our impact on the ocean you can do so at speakupforblue.com/patreon p-a-t-r-e-o-n you can just put in a level of support uh per month remember it is per month uh and uh we would really appreciate it it's our effort to try and educate people and guide people on how to live for a better ocean so you've been listening to the speakupforblue.com podcast thank you very much i am your host angel luen happy wednesday and happy conservation [Music]