More United Nations

The following guest blog was written by Dr. Sidney Holt.  Dr. Holt is ASOC's representative at meetings of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) and has decades of IWC experience. 

With respect to the management of fishing and whaling the 1982(1994) UNCLOS was three steps forward and one or two steps back. Looking at the evolution of the fisheries conservation and management provisions in basic texts through the period since the end of WWII it is striking how little innovation and critical thought was given to these rules, perhaps because as the years went by the action was more and more in the hands of diplomats and lawyers and less and less in those of scientists, although much lip-service was paid to the need for regulations to be based on the best scientific advice. The word ‘Conservation’ is in the titles and some text of the sections on fishing in coastal waters and on the high seas, but it is not defined.  An optimist can see this omission as positive – at least the word is not now tied to exploitation and a very specific management objective, but a positive and modern clarifying definition might have been useful. Maximum Sustainable Yield (MSY) remains the prime objective of management (“to maintain or restore populations of harvested species at levels which can produce the maximum sustainable yield”), but that is now “as qualified by relevant environmental and economic factors…”. This qualification was written to allow states and international organizations to escape from the strict MSY criterion in such a way as to avoid the need for sustainability, at least temporarily, and to take more than the ‘optimum’ catch. Theoretically that qualification could alternatively be interpreted as taking less than the physical maximum in order to improve profitability, but as far as I know no state has yet dared to broach that, though the EU Commission might be tentatively thinking about it. But a report published two years ago by FAO and the World Bank – “Sunken Billions” - did point out the huge financial advantages of going for a net economic maximum by catching a bit less than the maximum but with much less effort and hence cost. A second, but secondary reason for the qualification was to allow some flexibility in managing multi-species fishing operations, especially when the target species interact with each other ecologically, as competitors or as predator-prey pairs.

Whales, Whaling and the "International Community"

The following guest blog was written by Dr. Sidney Holt.  Dr. Holt is ASOC's representative at meetings of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) and has decades of IWC experience. 

The proposal by the authorities of the Principality of Monaco that the United Nations offer ‘full and permanent protection’ to all whales and dolphins on the high seas would, I suspect, have come as a surprise to many of those people who are interested in those animals and follow ‘the whaling controversy. (See details on blog ‘The Monaco proposal’)  If they think of it at all most would have come to associate the arguments about their fate with the International Whaling Commission (IWC), with its limited powers and strident claims by the pro-whaling factions that it is ‘dysfunctional’ – although, if it is so, it is they that have deliberately made it that way. But the UN has for long, and in many times and different ways, been involved with whales and dolphins and with whaling. I thought a short review of the history and main features of that involvement might be useful.

Welfare, Rights, Respect, Speciesism and Scientific Whaling

The following guest blog was written by Dr. Sidney Holt.  Dr. Holt is ASOC's representative at meetings of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) and has decades of IWC experience. 

Yesterday a friend sent me a marvelous, and immensely moving video-clip. It was about a pair of elephants, clan friends, who had been taken into captivity and separated for twenty years, then brought together again and released from their cages. The video recorded their recognition and reuniting ceremony; it can only be called love. I wished we could similarly see the release of a long-captive orca and its reunion with its wild family.

The cruelty of whaling has long been an intermittent concern of some people who have attended meetings of the International Whaling Commission (IWC). The first NGO to attend the IWC as an Observer was, I think, the Universities Federation for Animal Welfare (UFAW) and early on Dr Harry Lilley brought his accounts of the prolonged deaths of fin and blue whales in the Antarctic, seen from his perch as doctor in residence on one of the British factory ships. Later, more joined in – the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS), the Animal Welfare Institute (AWI), the Royal Society for the Protection of Animals,, the World Society for the Protection of Animals (WSPA), Humane Society International (HIS), the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), Cetacean Society International and others. They were mostly pre-occupied with the horrors of slow death and the escape of mortally wounded animals. I think they were not always looking at exactly the right bit of the process. The chase, between the sighting and the harpoon launch and bomb explosion is the most stressful for the animal in all hunts, at least those for the fast-swimming rorquals. In human terms it is the torture before the execution. And there is a world of difference between trying to improve the living and working conditions of slaves and abolishing slavery.