CURRENT ISSUES AND KEY THEMES 29 The International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling: From Over-Exploitation to Total Prohibition

• Main Author: Sebastian Oberthür
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: Blue whale
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.580.4039; http://www.fni.no/ybiced/98_03_oberthur.pdf

The biological family of whales consists of about 80 spe-cies of varying size. Commercial whaling traditionally focused on the big whale species, the blue whale being the largest living mammal on earth. Whales have been caught for their fat, their meat, their bones, and their baleen or teeth. Since ancient times whaling has been conducted in catcher boats starting from the coast (coastal whaling), with the catch being processed in land stations. In addi-tion, indigenous people have always been whaling for their own usage (aboriginal whaling).1 The first signs of the over-exploitation of whale stocks were confined to specific regions. The situation worsened, however, in the middle of the nineteenth century, when modern whaling on the high seas (pelagic whaling) be-came possible. Whaling was now conducted by ‘expedi-