The suffering of the whales

Modern whaling is extremely cruel. The harpooners have to aim at a partly submerged, moving target from a moving platform, from a distance, and often in difficult sea and weather conditions. The probability of successfully achieving an instantaneous kill under such circumstances, even with an experienced harpooner, is low. Iceland has been hunting and killing whales for scientific research purposes since 1986 and has yet to provide any welfare data to the IWC on killing methods and Times To Death (TTDs).

Iceland claims that it is using the same techniques as those used by Norwegian whalers and therefore doesn't need to provide any data. The Norwegian hunt has been hugely condemned for its cruelty who claim that 80% of minke whales die instantaneously. Japanese whalers in the Antarctic claim a mere 40% of whales do so but there is no independent verification of these TTDs and no reliable criteria for telling when a whale is actually dead. This means some whales could still be conscious when butchered.

Even if these claims of instantaneous death are accurate, which is extremely unlikely, it would still mean that hundreds of whales are suffering the most appalling agonies, for anything up to and over an hour, before death.

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