Every day thousands of whales are hunted down and slaughtered and all in the name of science. This whaling has been called "Research Whaling".
Despite the global ban of commercial whaling, Japan uses the provision in the 1946 whaling convention which allows whales to be killed for scientific purposes. It's used as a way of getting around the laws of whaling. However little, if any useful information comes from ‘scientific whaling’ and it is quite simply commercial whaling conducted under the guise of science. Whaling countries issue their own catch limits, but not the International Whaling Commission. This means that any number of whales can be killed.
Scientific permit whaling requires whale meat to be used, i.e., to be sold or given away. This means a scientific permit is little more than a licence to sell and eat whale meat. In this day and age scientific studies on animals can get so much more information on the studied animal with only a little bit of the animal used. Scientists from IFAW’s Song of the Whale research vessel have pioneered technologies and techniques to study whales without harming them.
This is an important issue as whales have really only began to trust humans again and allow us to get close to them butt whale populations have also begun to bounce back and increase around the world.
