Reply to comment

Personally, I do believe that whales have culture and would never personally eat a whale if there were other food sources available. That being said, I recognize that some human cultures use whale meat as a food source, and I'm ok with that. However, I am not ok with humans disregarding the effects that commercial whaling, like commercial fishing, has on marine ecosystems. It is not ok to allow another species to go extinct because we wanted it's meat. There is an ecologically responsible way to approach whaling. I do not have all the solutions, but at the moment I am inclined to favor a quota system for whaling. However, there's a big problem with this system: there's currently no way to regulate it. Until some kind of regulatory agency with real authority is created, regardless of what countries "agree" to, there's going to be no change in behavior. So, this problem goes from ecological to political very quickly. Since whaling occurs in international waters, is it appropriate to have an agency that punishes whaling "infractions"? Who would make up this agency? How would the agency be run? As a scientist, I have no answers to these questions.