Return of the whale hunters

Killing that which you love is one of the more discomforting human failings; especially when it comes to animals.

As last week's mass stranding on a Cape Town beach demonstrates, whales and dolphins exert a particularly powerful hold on the public imagination.

The 55 false killer whales (not pilot whales, as was widely reported in the press) beached themselves at Kommetjie, floundering helplessly on the sand.

Attempts to save them were hampered by well­intentioned amateurs.

Even the humane decision taken to euthanise the animals was threatened by members of the public who insisted on futile efforts to "rescue" the whales.

Nan Rice of the Dolphin Action and Protection organisation told the South African Times: "I think it's disgusting. It makes me sick. You can't be ­sentimental, you have to be serious.

The public get hysterical and start ­acting like prima donnas and throw themselves on the beach and have to be carried away by the police."

Emotions run high on the subject of cetaceans (the scientific name for the suborder of whales and dolphins).

Perhaps it's a sense of collective guilt — our relationship with these animals has been bloody ever since the first harpoon was thrown.

Reconciling ­centuries of whaling with a few decades of whale-loving isn't easy.

Having spent eight years watching and writing about whales, I've come to the conclusion that our shared history is destined to remain troubled.

Now new evidence has emerged to underline that conviction.

In the award-winning documentary, The Cove, which stunned audiences at this year's Sundance Festival, and is due for release later this summer, director Louie Psihoyos uses covert filming to uncover Japan's dirty little secret: the annual slaughter of 23,000 dolphins.

In whale terms, Japan has long been a pariah. It exploits a loophole in the 1986 international moratorium on whaling to carry on "scientific research" in the Pacific and Southern Oceans.

Sailing into areas officially declared as whale sanctuaries, its fleet catches thousands of minke and fin whales each year.

Grenades are shot into the crania of their prey; some ­animals may take hours to die. Rather than furnishing data for scientific experiments, they end up as whale sushi and whale burgers.

Last year, the Japanese proposed to start hunting humpbacks. These are exquisite animals.

I've been watching them in the waters off Cape Cod for years and never fail to be amazed at their beauty and amused at their antics.

It is impossible not to smile when a 50-ton, 50-foot whale launches itself out of the water before your eyes.

Selecting these crowd-pleasers as their latest target was a provocative act; the Japanese must have known it would arouse the ire of the eco-warriors of Sea Shepherd.

Under the command of their Canadian captain, Paul Watson, and funded by well-wishers (including the rock group the Red Hot Chili Peppers), these cetacean avengers have put themselves on the front line of the "whale wars".

Last year, two of their crew were accused of piracy when they boarded a whale-catcher to deliver their protest in person.

The Japanese call them terrorists, others see them as heroes.

The Cove is set to raise the temperature of an already heated debate to new highs.

Unlike its whaling fleet sailing in remote seas, the Japanese dolphin harvest is carried out on its coastline, within sight of its citizens.

Aware of the negative publicity, the authorities erect huge blue tarpaulin screens across ­narrow inlets to prevent filming as dolphins are driven to their deaths.

Nevertheless, The Cove has managed to sneak through this curtain of shame. What it reveals is horrifying.

Most of the mammals killed are destined for human consumption, misleadingly labelled as whale meat (rather than dolphin). But some are taken alive.

Only animals which show the most defiance — by leaping highest — are spared for sale to dolphinaria.

It is an inexcusable trade, and I urge anyone who cares about these animals to ­protest to the Japanese government.

Yet there are other factors to consider in this issue of inter-species morality.

Apart from the fact that whaling continues in Norway, where whale-watching tourists have been aghast to see the very animals they are observing being harpooned by whalers, Europe also hosts its own little-known whale cull.

In the Faroes — North Sea islands under Danish and therefore EU jurisdiction — up to 1,000 pilot whales are slaughtered each year during the grindadráp, a communal hunt that dates back to the islanders' Viking roots.

Pilot whales are named for their propensity to follow a leader, a loyalty that their human pursuers exploit.

Pods of whales are forced into shallow waters which turn red with blood as the animals' necks are severed with sharp knives.

Their meat is then divided up among the islanders; young children wander the harbourside carrying bleeding chunks of whale in carrier bags. (In November 2008, Faroese authorities declared the meat inedible, due to the intake of toxic PCBs. Much of Japanese whale meat may be ­similarly contaminated.)

In the Faroes, as in Japan, the defence is that these are long-held traditions.

The Japanese counter that in North America, the Inuit are allowed to hunt bowhead whales, far rarer than their own prey. They have a point.

Bowheads are the longest-living animals on earth: in the 1990s, Bowheads were found to have 200-year-old Inuit harpoons imbedded in their blubber, making the animals themselves even older.

There are other historical considerations. At the end of the Second World War, after the atomic bombs had fallen on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the decommissioned Japanese navy was converted into a whaling fleet by the Allied powers, so the defeated and starving nation could feed itself.

Since Japan was encouraged and even assisted in whaling by the West — whale was served in schools until the 1970s — it irks to be lectured on the subject.

"It's not because Japanese want to eat whale meat," Ayako Okubo of the Ocean Policy Research Foundation told the New York Times recently.

"It's because they don't like being told not to eat it by foreigners."

Indeed, some Americans contest that it was their own over-use of pressure and the moral weight of the environmental lobby that pushed Japan into its stubborn position.

At next week's annual meeting of the International Whaling Commission in Madeira, pragmatic conservationists will argue that the Japanese should be allowed to take minke whales (numerous enough for their hunters to call them "cockroaches of the sea") in their own waters, thereby relieving the pressure of their unrestricted whaling in the Southern Ocean.

Japan has already signalled its disapproval of the idea; a new battle looms.

Meanwhile, the West congratulates itself on having banned whaling long ago.

Yet if it wasn't for the fact that America, which pioneered modern whaling in the 18th century, had given up the industry for entirely commercial reasons at the beginning of the 20th century, there would have been no international moratorium.

By then, whales had outlived their uses for the burgeoning American empire, which no longer needed whale oil to light its cities and lubricate its industries.

Its attentions had fixed on mineral oil, discovered in Pennsylvania in 1859, and all the attendant geo-political strife it caused.

Yet whales were even conscripted into those global wars.

Nitroglycerine derived from whales was used in explosives in the First World War.

Trench foot was treated using whale oil. Later, nuclear submarines were designed to the hydrodynamics demonstrated by whales, themselves natural sub–marines: sperm whales can dive for two miles and stay down for up to two hours in their search for squid.

Even the space race found a use for whales. Sperm whale oil does not freeze in sub-zero temperatures, making it perfect for use by Nasa.

As I write this, the space probe Voyager and the Hubble telescope are spinning in space, lubricated by whales.

Killer whales and dolphins were trained by the military to plant underwater mines.

In Vietnam, dolphins were employed as assassins, injecting enemy divers with lethal doses of ­carbon dioxide.

Dolphins were also used in both Gulf Wars — to what extent, or in what capacity, remains an official secret.

Britain cannot claim innocence on this score. We were still a whaling nation in the 1960s. Up until the mid-19th century, London itself was a whaling port.

At Greenwich and Rotherhithe, on quays now overlooked by modern apartment blocks, bits of whale brought back from Greenland once lay.

The site of the Millennium Dome was a whale-rendering plant — tactfully situated out of ­olfactory range of the capital.

London's whaling past is also remembered in Whalebone Lane, Dagenham, once the site of an arch constructed from the jawbones of a Right whale that foundered in the Thames in 1658 and which was promptly slaughtered.

Other cetacean visitors to London have been little better treated.

In 1793, a 30-foot killer whale found itself subject of "an exciting chase" after it was harpooned, towing its hunters at speed up and down the Thames.

In 1842, a minke whale dawdling off Deptford was set upon by five sailors.

Armed with a "large bearded spear", they attacked "the monster", which "soon showed symptoms of weakness, and threw up large quantities of water from the blowing apertures on its back". Its carcase ended up on display outside a ­butcher's shop.

Nineteenth-century London was fond of such sensation.

In 1831, a giant wooden hut was erected in Trafalgar Square, wherein the skeleton of a ­massive blue whale was set up, to the delight of Londoners who paid a ­shilling to quaff wine while wandering within the leviathan's ribs.

In 1864, an entire preserved fin whale was exhibited in a shed in Shoreditch behind Liverpool Street station.

And at the Royal Aquarium in Westminster in 1877, a live beluga whale captured off Labrador languished in an iron tank measuring just six feet deep.

Even then it was clear that these were not exactly ideal conditions. ­

Thomas Claughton, the controversial Bishop of St Albans, complained the whale was "the creature of which the Psalmist speaks as placed in its element by the Great Creator"; it was not man's right to take him out of it.

The Times correctly predicted the hapless ­mammal's demise, adding: "Should he succumb to the unfavourable conditions of life in this city, his coat will make porpoise-skin boots."

Even more extraordinary was the fact that a dolphin stranded at Battersea Bridge in 1918 was summarily eaten by the Natural History Museum's staff and their "distinguished correspondents" at a Mansion House banquet.

"The opinions received afterwards were nearly all favourable, and some of them enthusiastic," reported Professor Sidney Harmer.

Contrast such historical fates with that of the whale which swam up the Thames in January 2006.

As the whale, a Northern Bottlenose, grew weak from stress and dehydration, its plight ­garnered international media coverage.

Its final passing, borne down river on a rubber bier, was greeted with the kind of solemnity accorded to a head of state.

Now its skeleton lies in the Natural History Museum — along with its amputated dorsal fin squashed into a glass jar.

Perhaps most surreal of all the ­capital's whalish tales, however, is that of the dolphins of Oxford Street.

In 1971 the London Dolphinarium, a bizarre striptease club, opened at 65 Oxford Street, complete with scantily-clad "aquamaids".

Remnants of its blue-painted tank can still be seen in a cellar off Soho Square.

The dolphinarium was run by a company called Pleasureama, whose "sole object", announced its chairman, Sir Harmar Nicholls, MP, was "to make a profit for its shareholders".

It lasted less than two years. Nevertheless, in 1974 Paul Raymond opened a Soho revue for which dolphins were trained to undo showgirls' bras.

Protests closed it down after six weeks. Not even world-weary Londoners could countenance such an outrage in the new age of "Save the Whale".

They might be surprised to learn that 40 years later that time has come again.

* For details of The Cove, see www.thecovemovie.com.

* Leviathan or, The Whale by Philip Hoare is published by Fourth Estate, price £18.99