Paul Watson & crew wait near Iceland to see if fisheries minister sticks to her guns against last whaling baron Kristján Loftsson
NORWEGIAN SEA––Ric O’Barry, 83, on June 20, 2023 issued an urgent appeal on behalf of Hvaldimir, possibly the most famous of all beluga whales.
But Paul Watson, 72, again upstaged O’Barry, as he often has, by disclosing to the English-speaking world the probable end of Icelandic whaling, announced earlier in the day by Icelandic fisheries minister Svandís Svavarsdóttir.
“Ocean ain’t big enough for both of ’em”
O’Barry turned against marine mammal captivity after a decade as a dolphin trainer at the Miami Seaquarium, where he trained––among others––the dolphin stars of the Flipper television series,
O’Barry first attempted to return a captive dolphin to the wild on Earth Day 1970.
O’Barry, however, was about five years too early to ride the publicity-and-fundraising crest generated by the rise of the animal rights movement.
Watson, first confronting Russian whalers off the California coast in 1975 as a Greenpeace volunteer, was right on time.
The Cove vs. Whale Wars
O’Barry, since then, has become the second most prominent marine mammal advocate ever, returning more captive dolphins to the wild than all other anti-captivity activists combined.
O’Barry even won an Academy Award for his part in filming The Cove, a 2009 documentary exposé of Japanese coastal whaling.
Yet the Whale Wars reality television program, starring Watson, debuted in 2008 and ran for a dozen years, making Watson’s name a global household word.
Hvaldimir the beluga
O’Barry on June 20, 2023 had just visited Hvaldimir the beluga.
“It is good to see Hvaldimir once again,” O’Barry posted to social media. “Frankly, I’m surprised he is still alive. He is not begging for food. He is begging for attention. Just wanting to connect with someone. Just wanting to be accepted, and loved.
“He is not much different than when Helene,” O’Barry’s wife of 27 years, “and I first saw him in the Arctic Circle in 2020,” O’Barry said, “except that he has lost considerable weight. He looks emaciated. His so-called life is still a humanized mess. And, I fear he is doomed,” because Hvaldimir continues to “play in traffic,” as O’Barry puts it, by venturing close to humans in boats.
AWOL from Russian Navy?
Hvaldimir first came to global notice in April 2019, Guardian reporter Hannah Ellis-Petersen summarized, when “Fishermen in waters near the small Norwegian fishing village of Inga reported that a white beluga whale wearing a strange harness had begun to harass their fishing boats.”
Picked up fellow Guardian reporter Jules Howard, “Upon the body of this whale there was a strap. Upon the fabric of this strap was written a long chain of human hieroglyphs – ‘Equipment of St Petersburg,’ the writing said. And then – almost as if it were all a dream – the whale disappeared.”
Resumed Ellis-Petersen, “A 2017 report by TV Zvezda, a station owned by the [Russian] defense ministry, revealed that the Russian navy has again been training beluga whales, seals and bottlenose dolphins for military purposes in polar waters,” more than 25 years after discontinuing work with marine mammals and selling many of the surviving animals to western marine mammal parks.
The Murmansk Sea Biology Research Institute, however, reportedly “concluded dolphins and seals were much more suited to the training and arctic climates than the beluga whales,” Ellis-Petersen wrote. “The whales were deemed too sensitive to the cold,” although belugas normally live inside the Arctic Circle, in much colder water than any dolphins, “and did not have the same ‘high professionalism’ of seals, who had a far better memory for remembering oral commands.”
Hvaldimir needs a friend
Whether released or escaped from the Murmansk Sea Biology Research Institute, Hvaldimir has occasionally reappeared in Norwegian coastal waters, apparently remaining habituated to humans despite years of freedom.
“Dr. Ingrid Visser from New Zealand and Norwegian biologist Sebastian Strand are committed to keeping Hvaldimir as safe as they can,” O’Barry said, “considering that they have no authority to keep people from riding on Hvaldimir’s back. Members of the public have been observed fondling him, scratching him with oars, and sticking objects into his mouth.”
O’Barry hopes to persuade either the Norwegian government or the Norwegian royal family to place Hvaldimir under special protection, but notes that he “has chosen the largest whaling nation on earth for his refuge.”
Norwegian whalers killed 580 whales in 2022.
Watson sails to Iceland
Watson, meanwhile, ousted from the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society in June 2022, 45 years after founding in in 1977, regrouped by forming the Captain Paul Watson Foundation, and acquired a former Scottish Fisheries patrol vessel he renamed the John Paul DeJoria II, after the entrepreneur whose private foundation helped to fund the purchase.
(See PIRATES! Captain Paul Watson goes down with the sinking Sea Shepherds.)
DeJoria, years earlier, helped Watson to buy a former Sea Shepherd Conservation Society ship also named after himself.
For the first voyage of the Captain Paul Watson Foundation, Watson took the John Paul DeJoria II into Icelandic waters, about 1,000 miles west across the Norwegian Sea from Hvaldimir the beluga’s last reported position, to confront the two whaling ships owned by Kristján Loftsson, 81, chief executive of Hvalur, the last Icelandic whaling company.
Svandís Svavarsdóttir
Loftsson, claiming possession of an Icelandic government permit entitling him to kill more than 160 whales in 2023, was reportedly readying his ships to sail, when “A few hours after the crew of the John Paul DeJoria II arrived in Icelandic waters,” Watson said, “Svandís Svavarsdóttir, the Icelandic minister of fisheries and agriculture, announced her decision to temporarily stop Kristján Loftsson’s illegal whaling operations.”
Said Svavarsdóttir, “I have made the decision to temporarily stop whaling in light of the unequivocal opinion of the professional council on animal welfare. The conditions of the law on animal welfare are inescapable in my mind. If the government and license holders cannot guarantee welfare requirements, this activity does not see a future.”
(Captain Paul Watson Foundation photo)
“Little time for whaling to resume”
Watson said he “sent a letter to every member of the Icelandic Althing,” or Parliament, on Sunday, June 18, 2023, “advising them of the arrival of the John Paul DeJoria II,” with a crew of 32 members, from a dozen different nations.
Assessed Watson, “Although the minister [Svavarsdóttir] stated that this is a ‘temporary’ halt, reality is that this leaves little time for whaling to resume. A delay until August 31, 2023 means a delay until the whaling season is over.”
Watson pledged that the John Paul DeJoria II “will stand by in the event that Loftsson is able to find a way to resume whaling. We will not allow for any whales to be killed this year, or next year, and we will not rest until the whaling ban is permanent.
“The John Paul DeJoria II will remain outside of Reykjavik Harbor,” Watson said, “until we see all work halted on Loftsson’s whaling ships and the harpoons removed and stowed away.”
Whaling hurts Icelandic tourism
Loftssen and Hvalur killed 148 fin whales in 2022, after killing 146 fin whales in 2018 and then sitting out the 2019, 2020, and 2021 seasons.
Reported Jenna Gottlieb for CNN, “The 2022 season could be Hvalur’s last, as the current license to hunt whales will expire in 2023, and Iceland’s minister of fisheries and agriculture [Svavarsdóttir] will then decide whether or not to stop issuing whaling licenses from 2024 onwards. It appears that there is little demand for whaling products and that the industry does very little for Iceland’s economy.”
That may be a significant understatement.
“Backlash over whaling is the last thing tourism officials want”
“As the Covid-19 pandemic had a devastating impact on Iceland’s tourism industry, backlash over whaling is the last thing many tourism officials want,” Gottlieb continued.
“It is actually well known and widely reported that the tourism industry believes that whaling hurts Iceland’s image as a tourism destination,” Icelandic Tourist Board executive director Jóhannes Þór Skúlason told Gottlieb. “Whaling has a very precise effect, and tourism companies feel it the moment whaling enters the discussion again.”
Added Travel Connect chief executive Asberg Jonsson, “The tourism industry and most Icelandic citizens are against whaling. It is very damaging to our country’s reputation. This has repercussions for our export and tourism industries.”
2018 resumption of whaling brought tourism crash
The Iceland Chamber of Commerce reported that tourism in 2017 accounted for 42% of the nation’s foreign exchange. The resumption of whaling by Hvalur and a second company which soon withdrew from killing whales coincided with a tourism crash during the next two years.
The global COVID-19 pandemic hit the Icelandic tourism even harder in 2020-2021.
But North Sailing, whose founder Arngrímur ‘Aggi’ Arnarson pioneered the Icelandic whale-watching industry, in 2018 “invested in a project to convert one of our sailing boats, The Opal, to have a backup electric engine rather than diesel, so that it would rely on wind and battery power only,” he told Phoebe Smith of The Guardian.
That proved so successful with whale-watchers that Arnarson converted the former diesel whaler Andvari to electric power, and turned it into a whale-watching vessel too.
“Both craft are charged from the 100% renewable hydro and geothermal energy that powers most of Iceland,” Smith added.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Whaling quota may not be renewed
Icelandic minister of fisheries and agriculture Svavarsdottir on February 4, 2022 indicated in a guest column for the newspaper and news web site Morgunblaðið that she may might not renew the self-set Icelandic whaling quota for 2024.
The current quota, set in 2019, in effect through 2023, allows Icelandic whalers to kill up to 209 fin whales, a species recognized by the International Whaling Commission and International Union for the Conservation of Nature as globally endangered, along with 217 minke whales.
The smallest of the baleen whales, or rorquals, minke whales are also the most abundant species. Minke whales continue to be commercially hunted by Japan and Norway, though in numbers significantly below their own self-set quotas.
Iceland is currently the only other nation other than Japan and Norway with a legal commercial whaling industry, albeit now suspended, having left the International Whaling Commission and authorized a whale hunt every year since 2003, whether or not whales were actually killed.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Loftsson plays games
Loftsson has repeatedly skipped whaling seasons, in 2011-2012, 2016-2017, and 2019-2021, citing the difficulty of exporting whale meat to Japan, the only whale meat buyer in the international market.
Loftsson issued his June 2019 announcement that he would not kill whales that year only hours after ANIMALS 24-7 published data––and distributed it extensively in Iceland––showing how each announcement of an Icelandic commercial whaling quota in recent years was soon followed by a drop in tourism.
(See Whaling harpoons Icelandic tourism & the whole nation suffers (UPDATE!)
But Loftsson, one of the richest and most politically influential people in Iceland, has long been motivated to kill whales by more than money.
Out for vengeance
Operating Hvalur despite huge annual losses, Loftsson on April 18, 2018 declared his intent to kill 191 fin whales that year––and a day later sold 34% of his shares in the HB Grandi commercial fishing empire, which he was instrumental in building, for $217.5 million, apparently to help finance the whale-killing.
Loftsson’s father founded Hvalur, whose name means “whaler” in Icelandic, in 1947. Loftsson himself sailed on whaling expeditions beginning at age 13.
But more than just maintaining a family tradition, which Loftsson insists is an essential part of Icelandic heritage, Loftsson appears to be driven by a quest for personal vengeance.
Anti-whaling activists Rod Coronado and David Howitt, acting under the flag of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, in November 1986 vandalized the Hvalur whale processing plant in Hvalfjörður fjord and scuttled the whaling ships Hvalur 6 and Hvalur 7 in Reykjavík harbor.
The Hvalur 6 and Hvalur 7 were both refloated, but were never repaired and returned to service.
Loftsson replaced them with the Hvalur 8 and Hvalur 9, of similar appearance but newer construction, used most recently in his 2018 and 2022 whaling ventures.
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Hoping this is deemed the right time to relegate whaling to the “dustbin of history.” We all have cultural traditions. The cruel and unnecessary suffering perpetrated by all peoples should be discontinued. It’s that simple.
Sharing with gratitude.