Whaling has not ended. Despite a commercial whaling moratorium that the International Whaling Commission (IWC) put in place in 1986, several countries continue to hunt whales today, and the practice takes more forms than most people realize. Japan resumed openly commercial whaling in 2019 after leaving the IWC, Norway never stopped hunting minke whales under a formal objection to the moratorium, and Iceland has periodically hunted fin and minke whales under a similar legal reservation. Indigenous communities in Alaska, Russia, Greenland, and the Caribbean hold IWC-approved quotas for subsistence hunts. Meanwhile, the Faroe Islands conduct drive hunts of pilot whales outside the IWC framework entirely. The picture is messier, more politically charged, and more economically fragile than either side of the debate usually lets on.
Which Countries Still Hunt Whales
Three nations conduct or have recently conducted large-scale whale hunts. Norway has hunted minke whales commercially every year since the moratorium, setting its own national quotas. Iceland has hunted both minke and fin whales intermittently, though its operations have stalled in recent seasons amid tightening welfare regulations and declining profitability. Japan’s story is the most convoluted: for decades it ran large “scientific research” programs in the Antarctic and North Pacific that critics called commercial whaling in disguise, then in December 2018 the Japanese government announced it was withdrawing from the IWC and would resume commercial whaling in July 2019.1Asia-Pacific Journal. After Withdrawal from the IWC: The Future of Japanese Whaling Since that resumption, Japanese whaling vessels have operated in the country’s own exclusive economic zone rather than in the Southern Ocean.
Beyond these three, indigenous and aboriginal communities hunt whales under a separate IWC category. Inupiat hunters in Alaska take bowhead whales; Chukotka communities in Russia hunt gray whales; Greenlanders hunt minke, fin, bowhead, and humpback whales; and the island of Bequia in St. Vincent and the Grenadines holds a small humpback quota. These hunts are governed by quotas renewed periodically at IWC meetings and are treated as a distinct legal and cultural matter from commercial whaling.
How Japan Went from “Scientific” Whaling to Walking Away
For most of the moratorium era, Japan conducted whale hunts under a provision in the IWC’s founding convention that allows member nations to issue permits for scientific research. The programs, known as JARPA and later JARPA II, killed hundreds of minke and fin whales per year in the Antarctic, with the meat sold on the domestic market afterward. Anti-whaling nations and conservation groups argued this was commercial whaling dressed up in research language.
In 2014, the International Court of Justice agreed. In a case brought by Australia, the court’s sixteen justices ruled, by a vote of twelve to four, that Japan’s JARPA II program was not genuinely “for purposes of scientific research” and ordered it to stop immediately.2ScienceDirect. Japan’s whaling following the International Court of Justice ruling: Brave New World – Or business as usual? Japan complied with the specific ruling but soon launched a redesigned program with a smaller catch and rebranded methodology. Frustration with what the Japanese government saw as an intractable anti-whaling majority at the IWC ultimately led to the 2018 withdrawal announcement. By leaving the commission, Japan gave up the ability to hunt in Antarctic waters (which are managed under IWC oversight) but freed itself from the moratorium within its own coastal zone.
Aboriginal Subsistence Whaling
The IWC formally distinguished aboriginal subsistence whaling, or ASW, as its own category in 1982. The commission defined it as whaling carried out by or on behalf of indigenous peoples “who share strong community, familial, social and cultural ties related to a continuing traditional dependence on whaling and on the use of whales.”3PubMed Central. On the edges of extinction: Indigenous whaling governance, the 1977 “bowhead controversy” and its legacy The distinction matters because ASW quotas are set on a different basis from commercial catch limits, with cultural need and food security weighed alongside population science.
The most closely watched ASW program is the Alaskan bowhead hunt. In the late 1970s, concern about the bowhead population nearly led the IWC to shut it down entirely, sparking what became known as the “bowhead controversy.” Inupiat communities argued, correctly as it turned out, that the population estimates used by the IWC were far too low because the survey methods missed whales traveling under ice. Revised counts eventually showed a much larger and growing population, and quotas were reinstated. That episode helped catalyze greater indigenous involvement in whale management science and remains a touchstone for how subsistence communities interact with international regulatory bodies.
The Faroese Drive Hunt
The Faroe Islands, a self-governing territory of Denmark, hunt long-finned pilot whales and occasionally other small cetaceans in communal drive hunts known as the grindadráp.4Human Geography. Mutual AID, Environmental Policy, and the Regulation of Faroese Pilot Whaling Because pilot whales are classified as small cetaceans, the IWC does not regulate them, putting the grind outside the moratorium’s reach. The hunts are opportunistic: when a pod is spotted near shore, boats herd the animals into a bay where they are beached and killed.
The practice draws intense criticism from animal welfare groups. A 2025 welfare assessment published in Biology Letters described how drive hunts in the Faroes and Japan typically involve prolonged herding of cetaceans, sometimes over hours or even days, into shallow water, followed by forced stranding, restraint, and killing using a spinal lance and exsanguination.5PubMed Central. An assessment of cetacean welfare in the Faroe Islands’ drive hunt Faroese authorities have made changes over the years to speed the killing process, and the meat is distributed for free within communities rather than sold commercially. For many Faroese, the grind remains a deeply embedded cultural practice tied to food self-sufficiency on remote North Atlantic islands.
Is There Still Demand for Whale Meat
One of the most striking features of modern whaling is how little consumer demand actually supports it. In Japan, whale meat consumption has plummeted since the postwar decades when it was a cheap protein staple in school lunches and working-class kitchens. A detailed study of Shimonoseki, Japan’s principal pelagic whaling port, describes government and industry efforts to stimulate whale product consumption, including reintroducing whale into public school lunch programs, and concludes that consumption is unlikely to recover. The study proposes that Japan has undergone what it calls an irreversible social regime shift away from whale-eating norms.6Asia-Pacific Journal. Demand for Demand: Consumption Norms, Hysteresis, and the Struggle to Revive Whale Consumption in Japan’s Largest Whaling Port
Norway faces a similar dynamic. Despite government support, domestic consumption of minke whale meat has remained modest and concentrated among older consumers. Iceland’s whaling industry has been sustained partly by selling whale meat to tourists as a novelty food and partly by exporting fin whale products to Japan, a trade route that itself depends on both countries remaining outside IWC and CITES enforcement pressure. The broader trend across all whaling nations is the same: younger generations are not developing the taste, and the industries survive more through subsidy and cultural inertia than through robust market demand.
Contaminants in Whale Meat
Declining demand might actually be doing consumers a favor. Marine mammals sit at the top of ocean food chains and accumulate persistent pollutants in their tissues, and the health data from communities that eat whale regularly is sobering. Research from the Faroe Islands, where pilot whale has long been a dietary staple, has documented a cascade of health effects: mercury from pilot whale meat adversely affects fetal nervous system development, the effects remain detectable through adolescence, contaminants in the blubber impair children’s immune responses to vaccinations, and the risk of hypertension and arterial disease rises with mercury exposure in adults.7PubMed Central. Dietary recommendations regarding pilot whale meat and blubber in the Faroe Islands The researchers behind that body of work concluded that pilot whale should no longer be used for human consumption.
The picture is similar in Japan. Analysis of Japanese whale products found that estimated daily intakes from higher levels of whale meat consumption exceeded international safety thresholds for total mercury, PCBs, and dieldrin, with mercury levels in some products reaching exceedance factors as high as 175 times the tolerable daily intake.8PubMed. Human health significance of organochlorine and mercury contaminants in Japanese whale meat Whaling communities and other high-consumption groups face the greatest risk. After studies showed that Faroese children exposed prenatally to methylmercury had reduced cognitive abilities, pregnant women in the Faroes reduced their whale meat intake, and their mercury levels dropped below safety thresholds.9PubMed Central. Mercury, food webs, and marine mammals: implications of diet and climate change for human health. The contamination issue adds a practical health argument on top of the conservation and ethical cases against whaling.
How Whale Populations Have Recovered
The good news is that many whale populations are bouncing back. Most baleen whales were severely overexploited during the twentieth century, but many populations have now had more than half a century of near-complete protection from hunting, and some have made remarkable recoveries approaching pre-exploitation levels of abundance.10PubMed Central. The future of baleen whales: Recoveries, environmental constraints, and climate change Humpback whales are the flagship success story, with several populations now large enough that they have been downlisted from endangered status. Gray whales in the eastern North Pacific, southern right whales off parts of South America, and bowhead whales in the western Arctic have all shown strong growth.
The recovery is uneven, though. Some populations remain critically small. North Atlantic right whales number only a few hundred and continue to decline. Antarctic blue whales are still a tiny fraction of their original population. The speed of recovery depends on factors like how depleted the population was to begin with, how quickly the species reproduces, and what other threats it faces in its current habitat. Some of that historical depletion was far worse than the world knew at the time. Soviet whaling fleets, for instance, took a greater number of humpback whales in the Antarctic from 1949 to 1972 than all other whaling fleets combined, killing several times the number that IWC biologists then believed to be sustainable, with the true scale hidden in falsified records until archives were opened decades later.11The Journal of Environment & Development. Illegal Whaling for Humpbacks by the Soviet Union in the Antarctic, 1947-1972
Climate Change as a Threat to Recovery
Even species that are recovering face a new obstacle. Climate modeling applied to Southern Hemisphere baleen whales projects that warming under high-emission scenarios will differentially affect species, leading to population crashes in some populations of fin, blue, and southern right whales by the end of this century, even as those populations are still recovering from historical depletion during the early decades.12PubMed Central. Future recovery of baleen whales is imperiled by climate change The mechanism is straightforward: baleen whales depend on dense concentrations of krill and other zooplankton, and those prey populations are sensitive to ocean temperature, ice cover, and primary productivity. As the Southern Ocean warms and sea ice retreats, the krill blooms that fuel whale recovery may thin out or shift geographically, leaving whales competing for food in places where it used to be abundant.
This complicates the politics of whaling in a way that neither side fully acknowledges. Pro-whaling governments have sometimes pointed to recovered populations as evidence that limited hunting is sustainable. But if climate change is going to squeeze those same populations later this century, the margin of safety gets a lot thinner, and even modest hunting pressure could slow or reverse gains that took decades to achieve.
What Whales Do for the Ocean
There is a growing scientific case that whales are not just charismatic animals worth saving for their own sake but active participants in ocean chemistry and climate regulation. The concept of the “whale pump” describes how whales feed at depth and then release nutrient-rich fecal plumes at the surface, transporting iron and nitrogen into the sunlit zone where phytoplankton can use them.13One Earth. Integral functions of marine vertebrates in the ocean carbon cycle and climate change mitigation That fertilization can stimulate new phytoplankton growth, which absorbs atmospheric carbon dioxide through photosynthesis.
The numbers on this are still rough, but they are suggestive. One estimate found that the roughly 12,000 sperm whales in the Southern Ocean defecate about 50 tonnes of iron into surface waters each year. That iron fertilization stimulates enough new phytoplankton growth to export around 400,000 tonnes of carbon to the deep ocean annually, while the whales themselves respire only about 200,000 tonnes. In other words, the net effect of those sperm whales is to remove roughly 200,000 tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere per year.14PubMed Central. Iron defecation by sperm whales stimulates carbon export in the Southern Ocean Whales also store carbon directly in their enormous bodies, and when they die naturally and sink, they export that carbon to the deep seafloor.15PubMed. Whales in the carbon cycle: can recovery remove carbon dioxide? The indirect pathways, especially the fertilization effect, represent the greatest potential for whale-driven carbon sequestration, though they remain poorly quantified and are an active area of research.
Whale Watching as an Economic Alternative
One argument that has gained traction over the past two decades is that living whales are worth more than dead ones. Whale-watching tourism has grown into a substantial global industry, and economic studies have tried to put numbers on the comparison. An analysis of cetacean-related tourism in rural West Scotland found that its economic value to coastal communities was three times greater than the value of commercial whaling for comparable communities in Norway.16Aquatic Conservation: Marine and Freshwater Ecosystems. The value of conserving whales: the impacts of cetacean‐related tourism on the economy of rural West Scotland Iceland has seen this tension play out directly: whale-watching boats in Faxaflói Bay sometimes operate within sight of the whaling station, creating an awkward tourism experience and prompting debate about whether the two industries can coexist.
The whale-watching argument has limits. It works best in places with reliable whale sightings, accessible coastlines, and existing tourism infrastructure. Remote Arctic communities that hunt bowhead whales are not going to replace subsistence food with ecotourism revenue, and suggesting they should strikes many indigenous leaders as a form of economic colonialism that ignores the cultural and nutritional role of whale meat. The economic case is strongest as a counterweight to commercial whaling in developed coastal nations, where it directly challenges the claim that killing whales is the only way to extract value from them.
Hunting Methods and the Welfare Debate
How whales are killed matters to the public debate almost as much as whether they should be killed at all. Modern commercial whalers use explosive harpoon grenades designed to kill the animal as quickly as possible. Norway has invested substantially in refining the penthrite grenade used in its minke whale hunt, and both Norway and Iceland have implemented combined ante-mortem and post-mortem welfare assessments to evaluate time to death and instantaneous death rates.17NAMMCO Scientific Publications. Developments in the quantitative assessment of welfare outcomes in hunted mammals subject to shooting The goal has been to demonstrate that whale hunting can meet welfare standards comparable to those applied to land-based hunting.
Critics counter that even optimized methods still result in a significant percentage of whales that do not die instantly and must be finished with secondary shots, and that the conditions at sea make consistent humane killing far harder than in a controlled slaughter facility. The welfare debate intensifies around drive hunts, where the herding process itself inflicts prolonged stress before the killing even begins. There is no easy resolution here: whale hunting takes place in open ocean on animals that can weigh tens of tonnes, and the physics of that encounter will always be different from harvesting livestock on land.
Non-Hunting Threats That Dwarf Current Whaling
For most whale populations today, hunting is no longer the primary danger. Entanglement in fishing gear, collisions with ships, ocean noise, and habitat degradation collectively kill or injure far more whales than harpoons do. Data from decades of bowhead whale examinations by hunters and biologists show that about 12% of harvested Bering-Chukchi-Beaufort bowheads carry entanglement scars, with the rate climbing to roughly 50% among large whales over 17 meters long.18ScienceDirect. The Bowhead Whale: Chapter 36 – Fishing gear entanglement and vessel collisions Ship-strike injuries were documented in about 2% of harvested whales in that population, though the sample was small.
For North Atlantic right whales, entanglement and ship strikes are the dominant causes of an ongoing population decline despite full protection from hunting since the 1930s. Fishing rope from lobster and crab traps wraps around their mouths, flippers, and tails, causing chronic wounds, emaciation, and eventual death. Speed restrictions on vessels in right whale habitat areas have helped but face resistance from the shipping industry. The point is not that whaling does not matter but that even if all whale hunting stopped tomorrow, most populations would still face serious human-caused threats. Conservation efforts that focus exclusively on whaling risk missing the bigger picture of what is actually killing whales in the twenty-first century.
International Trade Restrictions and Enforcement
The moratorium is only one layer of the legal framework constraining whaling. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) lists all great whale species on its Appendix I, which effectively bans international commercial trade in whale products. CITES has developed a unique system of trade sanctions for noncompliance, including multilateral recommendations to suspend all CITES-listed trade with recalcitrant countries. Since 1985, that scheme has been enforced against at least 43 states.19Review of European, Comparative & International Environmental Law. Enforcing CITES: The Rise and Fall of Trade Sanctions The practical effect is that even if a country hunts whales legally under its own domestic law, it generally cannot export the products to other CITES parties. Japan’s domestic commercial whaling, for instance, is largely confined to domestic consumption precisely because of these trade restrictions.
Norway and Iceland have entered reservations to the CITES whale listings as well, which creates a legal gray zone for trade between them and with Japan. Small volumes of whale products have moved between these countries, but the quantities are modest and the political cost of maintaining those trade channels is high. The combination of the IWC moratorium, CITES trade restrictions, and the European Union’s ban on whale product imports has created a web of constraints that keeps commercial whaling economically marginal even where it remains technically legal. Whether that web holds as geopolitical alignments shift and as whaling nations explore new markets is an open question that conservation groups watch closely.