Country representatives claim that the reasons for this slaughter are purely scientific

Jul 5, 2012 07:05 GMT  ·  By

Just yesterday, the Republic of Korea made it public news that it is planning on tracking down and killing endangered whales, all for the sake of research.

By arguing that its reasons for hunting down these marine mammals are purely scientific, the country manages to by-pass the rules and regulations that the International Whaling Commission (IWC) imposes on this activity.

As was to be expected, several conservationists and members of the IWC were appalled by this piece of news, and tried to fight back explaining that modern day research techniques allow for studying animals without having to kill them.

Their concern regarding Korea's latest whaling plans are fueled even more by the fact that, apparently, the species targeted by this country are all endangered ones.

On the other hand, Korean high officials claim that they have no choice but to resort to lethal whaling, seeing how the countries fishermen have been complaining for quite some time now that they are often kept from carrying on with their fishing activities by whales.

Thus, they argue that these marine mammals eat away large amounts of fish stocks, and therefore need be killed in order to aid the fishing industry.

WWF's official website reports that one of Korea's representatives made the following observations about this country's fishermen: “They are experiencing disturbances in their fishing activities due to frequent occurrences of cetaceans in their fishing grounds and an increasing number of minke whales are eating away large amount of fish stocks.”

However, Wendy Elliot, an environmentalist working with the WWF, argues that, “This type of senseless proposal derails the important work of the IWC on conservation issues of critical importance to whales, dolphins and porpoises. Conservation of threatened whale species is something all countries should be able to agree on.”

From where we stand, it is quite likely that the decline in fish stocks is a direct result of overfishing, which means that killing the whales in order to boost this industry will eventually prove to be futile.