Baja California's warm lagoons are alive with grey whales,
surfacing and diving, surfacing again, white plumes of spray
wafting in the sunlight. Moving among them, bobbing about in
rubber rafts, are hundreds of whale watchers, people who have
paid money to come and marvel at one of nature's great
spectacles. Few, if any, of these human observers realize that
every year more than 175 of these same animals end their lives
thousands of miles away on the shores of the Bering Sea,
ground to food for caged foxes. They are raised in farms
scattered along the coast of Chukotka, Russia's most easterly
territory and the traditional homeland of Yupik Inuit and
Chukchi.
In the town of Lorino, the largest whaling community in
Russia, the air stinks of rotten meat this summer day of
August 1991. On the beach, just beyond the weathered whaling
station, lie the heads and tails of at least fifty grey
whales, scattered among bones and long strips of rotting
flesh.
The migrating grey whales are killed only a few miles from the
shore, from an old whaling steamer. Harpoon lying on the beach
tells me that the Russians still employ the obsolete three-
and-half-inch black-power cannon; more humane methods used by
a few aboriginal whalers of the world have yet to arrive in
Chukotka.
Between fifty and seventy grey whales end up on the beach at
Lorino every year, in addition to 300 or 400 walruses and
perhaps as many as 1,000 seals of various species. But while
walruses and seals are consumed by the local residents, very
few eat grey whale meat. The reason is obvious: the Yupik name
for grey whale translates into English as something like "The
one that makes you shit fast." Instead, meat left over after
the oil has been rendered is transferred to the fodder kitchen
of Chuchotka's largest fox farm here at Lorino.
Part of each whale winds up in fifty-gallons cans as whale
oil, processed in an officially "non-existent" shore-based
whaling station. But only a tiny portion of the meat from the
thirty-ton greys is used as food for human beings - the
ostensible reason for harvesting the whales at all. Officials
of the former Soviet Union sent annual figures to the
International Whaling Commission (IWC) on the number of grey
whales taken, and every two or three years filed a detailed
report on the harvest. The IWC accepted the Soviet admission
that whale meat "left-over" from the aboriginal subsistence
hunt is fed to foxes. Furthermore, the IWC is not concerned
that this commercial use of whale meat violated the principle
of subsistence quotas, according to an IWC spokesman in
Cambridge, England, and it has never sent officials to
Chukotka to inspect the whaling operation there. Even
Greenpeace, which in the mid-1980s launched one of it's
"commando raids" to publicize the situation, has since focused
its attention on other concerns.
Processing 10,000 skins per year, the Lorino fox farm is the
single most important enterprise in the area, even though the
chairman of the local city council admits that the operation
is not profitable. "But it's the only way to keep our people
occupied", he says. It is difficult to obtain any more
official information than this about the farm, which is under
strict state control.
Further south, at the Yupik village of Novoye Chaplino,
residents are more forthcoming. "We never asked for the grey
whales", says a veteran hunter. "Not even the Chukchi people
did. Grey whales were taken in the old days by the local
people, maybe fifteen a year. But only occasionally". Simply
put, grey whales are not worth trouble. "Grey whales are
dangerous", he explains. "They attack to protect their young.
Sometimes the leading bull will attack whaling boats as soon
as he sees them. And the meat is no good."
The hunter says the village has asked the authorities for
permission to take different species, but the needs of the
farming operation override those of the local residents, "We
have asked the authorities to give us some bowhead whales," he
recalls. "We see them out there, and we can take them
ourselves; we don't need the steamer to do it. And we will eat
all the meat from the bowheads. But the government won't
listen to us. They say that if we get bowhead licences, no one
will hunt grey whales, and the greys are more important to the
economy of Chukotka then a few bowheads for us to eat."
The evening, when the sun hangs low in the sky and its soft
light dapples the bay of Novoye Chaplino, is a beautiful time
to watch the grey whales. From a board the research vessel
Akadamik Kurchachov, one sees five or ten at a time. These
animals are not endangered. With an estimated current
population of 21,000, the official annual IWC-quota of 179
grey whales is not a threat to the species.
But carried on in the guise of subsistence hunting, the grey
whale slaughter casts a long shadow over the legitimate
harvest practices of aboriginal people in Russia and
throughout the circumpolar world. Like many efforts to
"advance further the economy and cultural life of the native
peoples of the North", as a former Soviet decree maintained,
the fox farming industry was not an idea conceived by the
Chukchi or Yupik whale hunters. It came from someone sitting
behind a desk in Moscow, thousands of miles away.