Source: The High North publication, "The International Harpoon," July 3, 2000, published during the 52nd Annual Meeting of the International Whaling Commission held in Australia

Like gun-toting sheriffs with barely a thought for where their bullets were flying, WWF published a list last March of the world’s 10 “Most Wanted” species. Released in time for a meeting of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, the list purported to contain “ten of the world’s most sought-after animals and plants whose survival is threatened by international trade.”

Just an innocent attempt, we thought, to woo tabloid journalists looking for an easy story. But wait! What was the minke whale doing on this list? Numbering more than a million world-wide, only hunted in very small numbers under the closest supervision, and with zero inter-national trade at the moment, the minke whale surely was an odd candidate for WWF to single out for extinction. We blinked and heh presto! The minke whale was no longer on the list! In its place now resided the whale shark. Whether or not the whale shark belongs on that list is for others to decide. (It probably does though, since it’s very big, and has the word “whale” in its name.)

But what had happened to the minke whale? The High North Alliance likes to believe it was our open letter of complaint to WWF that freed the minke from its list of threatened species. But WWF Norway has also claimed credit for saving its parent organisation from embarrassment. Many is the time WWF Norway has assured WWF that the Norwegian minke whale hunt is sustainable. And this was not the first time WWF Norway has found itself in the awkward position of having to explain to Norwegians the strange things International says about whales and whaling.

On this occasion, however, its rescue operation was as clumsy as the gaff it sought to cover up. “Anyone who read the WWF press release would have immediately understood that it was not being claimed that the minke whale was a threatened species,” explained a hopeful Henning Røed of WWF Norway to the newspaper Fiskaren (May 26). Alarmed that our own reading abilities might be fading, the High North Alliance took the press release to our local bar to test Røed’s hypothesis. To our relief, a random sampling of non-dyslexic drinkers confirmed that saying the “survival” of a species “is threatened by international trade” can reasonably be interpreted as meaning the species in question is “threatened.”

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