What Goes on at the IWC :: IWC Marine Life Whaling Essays

What Goes on at the IWC-------There Leviathan, Hugest of life history creatures, on the deep Stretched like a promontory sleeps or swims, And seems a moving land and at his gills Draws in, and at his trunk spouts out a sea.Paradise LostOverexploitation is not limited to land resources alone. besides as our precious terrestrial and coastal habitats are delicate and similarly easily destroyed, so are the species of the open sea. Whales, some of the biggest and most properly mammals on earth, are not strong enough to protect themselves from our bloody actions. Since the first a few(prenominal) centuries A.D., Japan and Norway hire been whaling. The Dutch, British and Americans started a few hundred years ago. In the beginning, small(a) boats and hand-thrown harpoons were used, but as engineering advanced to fast motorboats, factory ships (on which whales are track down for months at a time, killing and processing them at sea) and exploding harpoons, killing ability increased and to a greater extent whales died. So many more(prenominal), in fact, that several species have been threatened some to the point of quenching. The California Gray whale was hunted almost to extinction in the last 1800s, then recovered, was hunted almost to extinction again by factory ships in the 1930s and 1940s, and recovered once more (Bryant). The species has been removed from the endangered species list, but they will be hunted again. The world-wide Whaling Commission (IWC) began regulating whaling in 1946. Regulation consisted of hunting quotas given to penis nations, but the quotas were too high and whale populations declined. Many species have been trim down to commercial extinction (Doyle) in which they are too rare to be worth hunting, and many local populations have been eliminated. The Northern right whales rime are down to 325 in the North Atlantic and only 250 in the North Pacific, and the species is showing no signs of recovery (Bryant). Once blue whales were h unted so that only about 450 remain in the Antarctic. . .two-tenths of one percent of the initial population size (www.seaweb.org), the fin whale was targeted, then the sei whale, then the minke and humpback. exclusively were hunted down to a fraction of the original populations. In 1982, the IWC passed an indistinct moratorium on all whale hunting, putting an end to almost all commercial whaling, which, at its peak, meant the death of more than 50,000 whales a year. Some species have responded to this protection with increased numbers, and some have not.