Faroe Islands and Norway catch more whales than Japan [1] but for some reason don't receive nearly the same level of outrage.
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Whales_Nordic.png
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Whales_Nordic.png
There is increasing evidence that whales have a huge role in climate change. Their poop feeds plankton which in turn absorbs carbon. And their physical bodies when they die sink, moving significant amounts of carbon to the bottom where is stays in that ecosystem far away from the atmosphere.
If the Japanese and Norwegians don't care about killing such magnificent animals for food, perhaps they can be taught to value them as ecological partners in the fight against climate change.
While true, it looks bad for people who are on the fence and/or are ambivalent. If the people expressing the outrage aren't outraged about the whaling in the Faroe islands, it looks like they don't really care about stopping whaling but instead just want to protest for the sake of it (or they're racists against the Japanese, etc).
I am also no fan of the Canadian arctic whale harvest. That it is classified as "aboriginal whaling", and is much smaller, makes no difference to me. Dead whales are dead whales regardless who is killing them.
For ease of reference, the non-Latinate name for this flavour of the tu quoque fallacy seems to be 'whataboutism' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism).
- Japan learned modern whaling (and bought ships/tools) from Norway, over 100 years ago
- Norway's last catch of Minke whales (the only whales they hunt, supposedly) was about 1,052, out of an estimated ~100,000.
- Japan has recently hunted a variety of threatened and endangered species, such as Beaked, Minke, Bryde's, Sei, Northern Fin, Humpback, Sperm, Western Gray, and North Pacific Right.
- A significant percentage of whales caught are by-catch of other fishing operations, which critics claim is often intentional.
- Since 1988, Japan has caught 16,323 whales through "Special Permit Catches".
- The research group that does the whaling gets its funding from the Japanese government, and Kyodo Senpaku, the company that processes and markets the whale meat.
- The International Court of Justice declared in 2014 that Japan's whaling was not for any scientific purpose.
From these facts, I gather that the problem is that Norway is catching a "reasonable" amount of whales that are not threatened, and that Japan was catching endangered and threatened species in large numbers and lying about the intention behind it.
Japan is not the only nation to hunt whales. Norway has a commercial operation in its own waters, for example. But what infuriates conservationists is that Japan is hunting and killing whales in a conservation zone, the Southern Ocean whaling sanctuary, that surrounds Antarctica. Japan claims that it does so only for scientific purposes.
Then, a few years ago, the International Court of Justice – at the instigation of Australia and New Zealand – ruled that the country’s whaling plan had no scientific basis. Japan was forced to halt whale hunting and had to come back with a plan to carry out “scientific whaling” in the region. This now involves catching only 330 minkes, and no humpbacks or fin whales. It was an important victory for conservationists.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/dec/23/sea-shep...
They did. Japan, Norway, etc. ignore it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Whaling_Commissi...