I have to admit that I conflated treaty with convention. Still, they signed an agreement and constantly circumvent it. The honest thing to do would be not to sign an agreement that would not be followed. The thing that pisses off pretty much all parties is the two-faced tack they’re taking. The impending expansion of “research” whaling is going to be pretty close to the numbers being taken when Japan’s whaling was openly commercial in nature.
Still, it’s an agreement between whaling nations. Maybe they view it as “Fight Club” or something.
Well, “Don’t hunt whales, they’re pretty,” is at least as rational an argument as, “Let me hunt whales, they’re tasty.”
This is a key point. As long as whaling is virtually banned, there is no real market for it and virtually anyone doing it is doing it illegally. Even choked down to that level, regulating whaling is hard.
If moderate legal whaling were allowed a market for whale meat developed, and an industry around that expanded, regulation would fall apart. Like all industries, it would never be happy with the size and level of profits it had and would want to get bigger. When the world’s oceans are your playing field, avoiding the eye of the referee is pitifully easy.
The pace at which modern fishing could scoop up the world’s whale population could easily outstrip the whale populations ability to regenerate, and any scientific attempt to show that whales were heading to extinction. The industry would in the usual fashion vociferously deny any evidence to this effect that was less than utterly rigorous, while lobbying ferociously against any form of regulation, until it was too late.