From ANIMAL PEOPLE, November 2000--

Japanese whaling gives Clinton/Gore a chance to boost credentials

WASHINGTON D.C., TOKYO-- Aware that support of Norwegian and
Native American whaling is the one environmental albatross around U.S. Vice
President Albert Gore's neck in his Presidential bid, outgoing President
Bill Clinton gave anti-whaling sanctions against Japan a high profile as
the campaign hit the home stretch.
The piece-de-resistance was a September 13 announcement delivered
by White House Chief of Staff John Podesta that, "The President is
directing the Secretary of State to inform the Japanese government that it
will be denied future access to fishing rights in U.S. waters."
The Clinton/Gore administration also ordered the U.S. Commerce
Department to consider trade sanctions against Japan within two months if
Japan does not satisfactorily comply with the intent of International
Whaling Commission resolutions. One resolution approved by the IWC this
year called for an end to so-called "research whaling," the pretext Japan
uses for killing whales in annually increasing numbers.
"The main newspapers in Tokyo dismissed Clinton's order as an
election ploy," Doug Struck of the Washington Post Foreign Service
reported from Tokyo. "In fact, Japanese fishers have not plied
territorial waters--within 200 miles of the U.S. coast--for 12 years. And
Clinton's action, [the Tokyo daily] Mainichi Shimbun noted, steers away
from trade sanctions that Japan might successfully appeal to the World
Trade Organization."
However, "Washington D.C. has signalled that it will allow foreign
vessels back into U.S. waters next year," wrote Michael Millett of the
Australian newspaper Melbourne Age, "with Japan excluded. Japan is
concerned that the exclusion may be extended to the U.S. protectorate of
Guam, depriving it of valuable fields for tuna and bonito."
Added Struck, "Japan has said that it will reduce its catch,
perhaps killing only one of the great sperm whales who have become a
galvanizing symbol of the issue. But the U.S. pressure has prompted an
uncharacteristically harsh reaction in Tokyo," which played in the U.S. to
Clinton/Gore--and candidate Gore's--advantage.

Rising pressure

The six-vessel Japanese whaling fleet sailed on July 29, targeting
10 sperm whales, 50 Bryde's whales, and 160 minke whales. In all, Japan
planned to kill up to 560 whales this year.
Although Japan began hunting minke whales in the name of research
almost as soon as it joined the then-two-year-old IWC moratorium on
commercial whaling in 1988, it had not hunted other protected species--at
least officially.
The first Bryde's whale was reportedly killed within hours after
the sailing.
Sile de Valera, the Irish Minister for the Arts, Heritage, and
the Islands, raised her strong objections to the expanded whaling in an
early August direct discussion with Kazuko Yokoo, the Japanese ambassador
to Ireland.
U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright delivered a similar
message to Japan about a week later, hinting that the Clinton
administration might respond with trade sanctions. Her warning played well
to the public, and the White House thereafter raised the pressure on
Japan in weekly increments.
The next gesture was a letter of protest signed by the U.S. and 14
other nations, hand-delivered to Japan by the Irish ambassador. Then the
U.S. on August 31 boycotted a 51-nation conference of the United Nations
Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, held on the
southern Japanese island of Kyushu.
Japanese leaders scoffed. Masayuki Komatsu, head of the Japanese
delegation to the International Whaling Commission, argued that economic
sanctions would chiefly hurt American workers. Shunji Yanai, Japanese
ambassador to the U.S., suggested that Japan might invoke retaliatory
sanctions.
Japan further defied global opinion on October 1, when 13 vessels
sailed from Taiji, near Tokyo, to kill a quota of 22,000 dolphins,
short-finned pilot whales, and porpoises. Their remains will be sold in
lieu of whale meat. Though many small cetaceans are as rare as some of the
great baleen whales, no whale smaller than a minke is covered by the
International Whaling Commission.
In Britain the Environmental Investigation Agency rallied
opposition to the Japanese dolphin slaughter with gruesome undercover video
of last year's hunt.

Japanese public

A recent poll based on direct interviews, jointly commissioned by
the Inter-national Fund for Animal Welfare and Greenpeace International,
found that only one Japanese adult in 10 supports whaling, and more than
60% have not eaten whale meat since childhood.
The Japanese newspaper Asahi Shumbun cautiously criticized the
Japanese government's attitude, without criticizing whaling per se.
"Japan is demanding that commercial whaling be resumed, but the
ocean-going whaling industry is long since dead and there is no longer any
real need to be concerned for the economic welfare of the nation's once
numerous whalers and whaling-related business," the Asahi Shumbun
editorialists wrote. "Such being the case," they continued, "Japan would
be wise to refrain from provoking anti-whaling nations...Slowly and
patiently is the way to go, if the purpose of continued whaling is not to
revive oceanic whaling per se, but to keep alive an old culinary
tradition."
Agreed Yomiuri Shumbun, "There is little to be gained by being
heavy-handed. Rather, there is major risk that it could fuel support for
the antiwhaling lobby."
But Seiji Ohsumi, head of the Japanese Institute of Cetacean
Research, was defiant in an interview with Japan Times staff writer Mick
Corliss.
Reported Corliss, "The U.S. stance is a ridiculous double
standard, Ohsumi said, pointing out that it is also a whaling nation, as
Native Americans in Alaska and Washington annually kill whales on a
comparable level. The number caught is less, but the whales caught are
far larger. The IWC permits Alaskan Eskimos to kill an average of around
50 bowhead whales per year, and permits the Makah tribe in Washington
state to kill an average of four grey whales per year."
The winter Alaskan bowhead whaling season was to start on October
2, with about half of this year's quota yet to be struck. Earlier in the
year, the whalers lost as many bowheads to sinkage as they were able to
land.
The Makah, in three years of sporadic attempts to kill grey
whales, have actually killed only one, a young female who was harpooned
and shot in May 1999.

Beer bust

Meanwhile in Taiji, Associated Press writer Ginny Parker said,
"Beer flowed and cheers went up on September 21 as a ship pulled into port
carrying 88 whales: 43 Bryde's whales, five sperm whales, and 40 minke
whales."
Video clips of the celebration also helped Gore--and upstaged
attempts by the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and Citizen Action to
remind voters via the Internet that Gore in 1993 sealed the sale of $261
million worth of missiles to Norway by tacitly agreeing at a White House
meeting with then-Norwegian prime minister Gro Bruntland to say nothing
about the unilateral Norwegian revival of coastal commercial whaling.
Gore also led the series of U.S. delegations to the International
Whaling Commission annual meetings which--according to the official U.S.
interpretation--in 1998 won a hunting quota of up to four grey whales per
year for the Makah tribe of Washington state.
Other IWC members including those who introduced the resolution
that supposedly set the quota still dispute the U.S. view of what they
voted for. The resolution authorized a subsistence quota of grey whales to
be divided among U.S. and Russian indigenous tribes, but the Makah
admittedly had no subsistence need for whale meat and had not killed whales
in 70 years.

Tuna standard

The Clinton/Gore administration was quieter about negotiations held
with Mexico on September 28 and 29 about allowing the Mexican tuna industry
to use "dolphin-safe" can labels on exports to U.S. markets. Both Clinton
and Gore strongly favored the 1997 law which changed the "dolphin-safe"
standard from requiring that a nation's tuna fleet kill no dolphins, to
allowing up to 5,000 dolphin deaths. The Mexican tuna industry claims to
have killed fewer than 5,000 dolphins per year since 1993.
Knowing that tuna typically swim beneath dolphins, fishers seek
tuna by looking for dolphins leaping from the waves, and draw nets around
the dolphins to catch the tuna--a procedure which formerly drowned hundreds
of thousands of dolphins, because the fishers rarely took the time to
allow them to escape before winching the nets in.
The original "dolphin-safe" standard, adopted by Congress in 1990,
in effect prohibited netting tuna "on dolphin," but caused fishers to use
"log sets" instead. This method consists of drawing nets around floating
logs, which tend to attract the small fish that tuna feed upon, and
thereby attract tuna too. "Log sets" rarely kill dolphins, but do kill
large numbers of endangered sharks and sea turtles.
The revised "dolphin-safe" standard was favored by most major U.S.
conservation groups, but was opposed by most humane societies, which
argued that instead of sacrificing dolphins to save sharks and sea turtles,
the U.S. should require tuna fishers to avoid all accidental bycatch.

Bush/Cheney

It was easy for Gore to keep a clean image on environmental issues
anyway after Republican Presidential nominee George W. Bush on September 29
came out in favor of opening 1.5 million acres of the Arctic National
Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling.
Observed Washington Post staff writer Mike Allen, "Bush and his
running mate, Richard B. Cheney, are both former oilmen, and Gore
supporters often refer to them as 'The Big Oil ticket.'"
Bush has politically favored the oil industry--and canned hunts--in
his current post as governor of Texas. For his pro-hunting position, Bush
was recently named "Governor of the Year" by Safari Club International.
Cheney, summarized Gail Collins of The New York Times, "spent
most of his career in government, but the arrival of the Clinton
administration left him cooling his heels at a conservative think tank,"
until "in 1995 he went salmon fishing with Thomas Cruikshank, chairman of
the Halliburton Company, a huge energy services business, who liked
Cheney so much that he recommended him as his successor, at a salary of
more than $1 million a year and oodles of stock options. During his tenure
there, the future vice presidential candidate's big coup was a merger with
the company's chief rival, Dresser Industries, whose chief executive
Cheney won over during a quail hunt. Cheney's ability to fish and shoot
his way to serious money," Collins wrote, "should inspire all careerists
who worry that inability to play golf stands between them and success."

Green ticket

Readers of both ANIMAL PEOPLE and Best Friends magazine were
confused by conflicting descriptions in the October editions of Winona
LaDuke, the Green Party candidate for U.S. Vice President. As
ANIMAL PEOPLE explained, LaDuke is an outspoken advocate of Native
American hunting, fishing, trapping, and whaling, whose nomination was
strongly opposed by New Jersey Green Party candidate and animal rights
advocate Stuart Chaifetz.
Yet Best Friends introduced LaDuke as "VP for animals."
Said Best Friends, Inc. cofounder and president Michael Mountain,
"We definitely goofed. We were supposed to be interviewing Green Party
Presidential candidate Ralph Nader to ask him about how his non-talk about
animals squares with the Greens' written platform," which this year
includes a passage more-or-less excerpted from a discussion document
circulated since 1988. "Then he bowed out," Mountain continued, "and the
Greens recommended us to LaDuke. We already have a letter from the Sea
Shepherd Conservation Society about LaDuke and her support of Makah
whaling, which will be in our next edition."