Whale Watching vs Whaling in Iceland

Having just returned from Iceland and feeling that things are moving forwards up there. I thought I would use Jake Levenson’s blog that he put up on IFAW’s website. Jake is great to work with, has an insatiable burn to end this awful killing industry, and we both want to help in building up the new Three Pearls organisation that includes artic fox, seals and of course whales.

Whale Watching vs Whaling in Iceland

posted on March 24th, 2010 by Jacob

It has to be tough running a whale watching business in Iceland. With weather, constantly fluctuating fuel prices, mandatory inspections and the array of safety requirements a passenger vessel must meet makes any kind of maritime endeavor a complicated job. Now imagine on top of all the usual requirements you’ve got people shooting harpoons everywhere and suddenly a typical day at work suddenly becomes much more challenging. That’s exactly what’s happening here; hundreds of thousands of tourists go out whale watching in Iceland each year and yet a small group of outspoken whalers go about harpooning the multi-million dollar whale watching industry. It just makes no sense. They are killing the very whales Iceland’s economy depends on.

In today’s IceWhale meeting it wasn’t long before someone brought up whaling.

Meeting Participants Had To Find One Another By A Matching A Photo-ID Card And Then Introducing Their Match...Made For A Fun Icebreaker!

I have to credit Richard though because he started off his presentation by posing a question to the group. He simply said “tell me your challenges” and the flood gates slowly opened. First it was about someone who was trying to lead Puffin watching trips where others decided they wanted to hunt these birds. A half second later someone chimed in that they have similar problems with whaling and suddenly we were going down a road I wasn’t quite expecting. People here really have a problem with whaling and feel as though the government should be supporting their industry rather than the whale killers. After all, the people gathered around the table bring millions to Iceland’s economy while the whalers bring nothing more than embarrassment and grief. The point of today’s meeting was to move IceWhale towards speaking as a collective voice against whaling and as the day wrapped up it was obvious they were doing just that. Really happy to see that become a reality, it’s been a long way coming.

Today's meeting was held at Iceland's Maritime Museum. Despite all the claims that whaling is a big part of being Icelandic not one of the many paintings depicting traditional Icelandic life contained anything about whaling.

Few Icelanders actually eat whale meat and what makes it worse is that the only consumer of whale meat seems to be from tourists wanting to sample what they think is Icelandic culture. In reality the restaurants serving whale meat advertise in English hoping to attract the same tourists who go whale watching! IceWhale’s membership meets a large percentage of these tourists everyday and if they can successfully educate just some of their 300,000 annual passengers, maybe just to steer them towards restaurants that don’t serve whale, they will successfully cut off the little demand that exists for whale meat. I’m really excited to be helping them accomplish this!