How "to outfox the whalers once and for all"

- A Recipe -

"The (whaling) commission exists to regulate whaling, not to prevent it. But it imposed a moratorium on all commercial whaling in 1986. Now many environmentalists and animal-rights lobbyists want an end to commercial whaling." (Economist 28/5/94).

"WWF is totally committed to maintaining the moratorium .... the issue is how to achieve these objectives within the International Whaling Commission, originally established to "regulate" whaling ..." (Dr. Robin Pellew, Director, WWF UK, letter to the editor, Daily Mail, 19/05/94)

"At a meeting in Mexico, the IWC agreed without a vote to accept a new scientific system for setting quotas to kill whales - but to postpone its adoption indefinitely. Conservationists believe that by the time any action is taken over quotas the whaling nations will have lost interest." (Independent on Sunday 29/5/94).

" To Side A, (the EIA side) any rules for whaling are simply anathema, something that in itself would cause whaling to resume. To side B, (Greenpeace, WWF, IFAW) it's a chance to outfox the whalers once and for all, by making sure that if whaling does "resume", it can't. (BBC Wildlife, June 1994)

"Pro-whaling countries must be denied any excuse to leave the IWC ...... WWF opposes the Revised Management Procedure (RMP), the scientific model for calculating whale quotas, but believes the only option available now is to defuse the RMP by having it put to one side." (Dr. Robin Pellew, Director, WWF UK, letter to the editor, Daily Mail, 19/05/94)

"Our objective is to ensure that the RMP can never be implemented " (Peter Melchett, Executive Director, Greenpeace UK. Letter to the editor of Daily Mail 19/5/94)

"Get the Southern Ocean sanctuary on the table, says Side B, play the cards fast, and this, in the words of IFAW's Sidney Holt, is what could happen: "The proposed sanctuary will protect 90 per cent of the world's remaining whales..... Whaling north of the sanctuary by factory ships has been prohibited for a half century and will remain so. The existing Indian Ocean sanctuary protects the whales completely in that region". These geographical restrictions would combined with a tough RMP - with its "safeguards for enforcement and insistence on a humane way of killing whales" - create qualifications that "would not be met by whalers in 50 years, and probably never." " (BBC Wildlife, June 1994)

"This result (the adoption of the sanctuary) .... is for the IWC a milestone along the road being marked out towards universal protection of whales." (Sydney Morning Herald, 28/5/94)

"Perhaps most importantly of all, the Antarctic sanctuary has greatly accelerated the IWC's tranformation from an organisation which regulates the hunting of whales into one which preserves them. " (The Observer, 28/5/95).

"This one (the 1994 IWC-meeting) is the best of all in thirty years. The long nightmare in the Antarctic was finished. We will finish the little nightmare in the North Atlantic next year .... We had a strategy. Every single point in that strategy has been achieved this year". (Sidney Holt, International Fund for Animal Welfare in a video produced by Robins Barstow from the Cetacean Society International)

On the final day of the 1994 meeting, the new reality was summed up well by one Commissioner who ironically suggested that the body's name ought to be changed now from International Whaling Commission to International Whale Commission. So it has become today, de facto. Long live the IWC! (Whales Alive, newsletter published by the Cetacean Society International, July 1994)