Kate Sanderson was born in 1961 in Glenelg, Adelaide, grew up in Melbourne and studied at Sydney University. Her favorite TV shows as a kid were Skippy and Flipper. These days she serves her own kids vegemite for breakfast and whale meat for dinner.

Whales have become an important part of her professional life. For five years, from 1993-1998, Kate was General Secretary of NAMMCO - the North Atlantic Marine Mammal Commission, which is an international body for the conservation and management of whales and seals in the North Atlantic. Its members are Norway, Iceland, Greenland and the Faroe Islands.  

Her present position is adviser on marine resources and environmental affairs in the Deptartment of Foreign Affairs in the Faroese Prime Minister’s Office. This department will one day become a fully fledged Foreign Ministry if the Faroese vote for sovereignty from Denmark, which they are currently negotiating. Kate’s interest in whaling started when she went to the Faroe Islands in 1985 on a scholarship to study Faroese. Here she quickly became aquainted with the centuries old tradition of pilot whaling, and a large wave of protest campaigns against whaling.

This conflict generated a research interest in Faroese whaling, and in particular in perceptions of whales and whaling through history. She soon found herself employed by the Faroese Home Rule Government explaining the Faroese custom of driving whales ashore and slaughtering them with knives, and married to the Faroese poet, Carl Jóhan Jensen.  

The Harpoon: Kate, tell us how it is possible for an Australian to defend Faroese whaling.

Kate Sanderson:. I haven’t joined a new religion or changed my basic values in any way since leaving Australia. It’s all very simple really. The Faroe Islands, like any nation, want to be as self-reliant as possible by making the most of their own resources. The climate here is harsh and there is only land enough for grazing sheep. The Faroese have always depended heavily on what the sea can provide. Pilot whales are an excellent source of food – protein in the meat and polyunsaturated fats in the blubber – and mother nature takes care of production, as she does with fish.

 Coming from a meat-eating, nature- loving nation, I believe most Australians who have the chance to visit here, experience the environment and the people and put the whale hunt in its proper perspective would feel the same way I do. The hunt is of course a bloody sight – but the way the whales are killed is the most efficient and safest way to get the job done under the circumstances. The whales are unconscious within seconds of the first cut being made, and dead ususally in well under a minute. The alternative is importing farmed meat from slaughterhouses - where the blood is not photographed – over long distances from other coun-tries. I don’t see that as a better alternative, neither in animal welfare nor ecological terms.

The Harpoon: Pilot whaling is a non-commerical acitivity. But you also support commercial whaling in the North Atlantic and even the reopening of ex-port of whale meat: Aren’t you afraid of a repetition of the old whaling industry’s depletion of whale stocks?

Kate Sanderson: No, I’m not. I think we have to keep a clear historical perspective here. We have a radically different global approach to our use of the oceans today than when everyone – including Australia - was out there catching all they could get, whales and all. They were the days before coastal states ex-tended their fisheries zones to 200 miles and before the Law of the Sea Convention was signed. They were also the days before vegetable and synthetic oils were developed for commerical use and replaced whale blubber on international markets. The oceans and seas are highly regulated today, science has advanced, as have the requirements and regimes for countries to work together on management and control measures.

I don’t think we can be more or less distrustful of commercial whaling than we are of commercial fisheries. In both cases there is a clear need for strict and effective control systems, because economic gain will always be an incentive for some to bend the rules, and there are still plenty of grey zones which lead to conflicts. Whaling is in fact easier to control than fisheries. Estimating whale abundance is a more reliable science than estimating fish stocks, and whale biologists are certainly an abundant species. DNA technology makes it easy to register and identify individual animals so that products on the market can be traced to their source. It’s all common sense. I certainly don’t see the international trade factor as a legitimate argument against whaling on a commercial basis. What if we applied the same logic to fisheries? These arguments are a smokescreen for what is really at the bottom of anti-whaling campaigns – that it’s morally wrong to kill whales, because they’re “special”.

The Harpoon: So what do you think of the Australian whaling policy?

Kate Sanderson: It’s an easy policy to have when there are no conflicting political interests at home to take into account. The less you have at stake yourself, the louder you can shout at others. Being “anti-whaling” provides a cheap green profile as a so-called “environ-mental” policy, but it’s a policy based on emotions rather than on principles. As an Australian myself, I don’t believe it’s truly representative of Australian views on wildlife management and conservation in general, or even whaling in particular, especially not if you com-pare it with nation-al wildlife conservation issues, such as kangaroo hunting. But then the problem is that whaling is not presented as a wildlife management issue. It seems to be more of a religious issue – the Government represents the view that whales are “special” and takes it upon itself, on behalf of the nation, to actively force this view onto others in international fora such as the IWC. This is tanatmount to condemning the cultures and dietary customs of other countries. It doesn’t sit well in a country which has been struggling to shake off its colonial past and now prides itself on its multi-ethnicity and tolerance. But I think the media have a lot to answer for.

The Harpoon: Why?

Kate Sanderson: The media blindly regurgitate the one-sided depiction of whalers as “the bad guys” – often bordering on the racist – which they get nicely packaged with ready-to-use pictures from a small group of very vocal and media savvy campaigners.

Who do these campaigners really represent, besides themselves? Do their members really have a say on policy issues, or do they simply believe what they are told to believe, based on the slanted information they receive? More importantly – why are the media not asking these questions? If I know the Australian media at all, the answer is that that would be too much like hard work.  

Click here to return to the Ethics Contents Page