Iceland - Be a Nice Land

So, Iceland,  an island nation in the North Atlantic, located between Greenland and Norway has begun killing whales again.  After almost two decades of abiding by the International Whaling Commission's moratorium on whaling,  Iceland is following the Japanese in defying the international consensus that prohibits the slaughtering of whales.

Whale Killing Boats - Reykjavik Harbor, Iceland

It's true that Iceland is a seafaring nation with a whaling tradition. It is also true that Iceland has no economic or nutritional need to kill these magnificent warm-blooded creatures. Nearly all of the meat that comes from the whales killed by Icelanders is sold to Japan.

I have been to Iceland. It is beautiful, volcanically active, and largely untamed.  The people there are lovely:  friendly, well educated, and sophisticated.  Why they are so defiant on the morality of killing whales is a mystery to me. It has to be expensive to operate those whaling vessels.  It can't be a very profitable, if at all. 

Icelandic whaling, like Japanese whaling, is nothing but industrial scale slaughter in the cruelest fashion.  The preferred method of killing has not changed for nearly a hundred years.  Imagine for yourself, a pod of fin or minke whales, the species most commonly killed in Icelandic waters.

Fin Whale

A killer boat approaches at high speed forcing the whales to flee. But they cannot outrun the boat, and when the whales are exhausted, a man stands at a cannon sized gun high on the killer boat's bow, and shoots harpoons loaded with explosives into their bodies.  The exploding tip shreds the internal organs of the targeted whale, causing an agonizingly cruel death.  

If there were a survival need for whale meat,  such a slaughter might be justifiable.  There is no such need. This is about the cold-hearted exploitation of living creatures - the largest on Earth - purely for economic gain.   In fact, this kind of thing is happening in so many ways all over the Earth.  Humans reducing the planet's living treasures to resources ripe for plunder.

The killing of whales is a throwback to another era. It is unnecessary. It is cruel.  It is an obsession unworthy of the people of Iceland.  It is also a reflection of the entrenched mindset that favors exploitation over stewardship.  That kind of cold-blooded, profit-centered thinking must be marginalized. We have only one planetary home.  We all must learn to protect it, for our own sake as well as for creatures like the great whales that live here with us.

I would love to return for another visit to Iceland, but. I will not. I will not go to Iceland again until they repudiate their whaling tradition for good.  If every potential tourist took that step, they would be forced to stop whaling, because whatever money their whale slaughter generates is surely small compared to the money that flows to Iceland from tourism.

Here is a link to the International Whaling Commission's page on Icelandic whaling... http://iwc.int/Iceland