Iceland has issued a new five-year license to hunt hundreds of whales in their waters each year, boldly reaffirming its controversial stance on whaling.
The Icelandic Ministry of Food and Agriculture announced this week it had granted licenses that allow annual catches of 209 fin whales and 217 minke whales during the whaling season, which runs from June to September. The permits are granted for five years with annual extensions, allowing up to 20 percent of unused quotas to roll over.
The license for fin whales was given to Hvalur hf, the largest Icelandic commercial whaling company, while the minke whales can be hunted by a trawler owned by Tjaldtangi ehf.
Fin whales are listed as vulnerable on the IUCN Red List. Measuring up to 25 meters (85 feet) in length, they are the second-largest animal on Earth in terms of length, second only to the blue whale.
Minke whales are the smallest of the “great whales”, measuring around 7 to 9 meters (22 to 29 feet) in length. Although they are not at risk of extinction, there are serious ethical concerns about the way they are hunted, as with fin whales.
The Icelandic government noted that the “exploitation of living marine resources in Iceland is under strict constraints” and the total catch allowance followed the advice of the Marine Research Institute which is based on assessments by the North Atlantic Marine Mammal Council.
Reacting to the news, environmentalists and animal welfare groups described the decision as a “disaster for conservation” and suggested it was a slippery move from Iceland’s outgoing conservative government.
“Iceland has just issued a license to kill. The few wealthy whalers of the country continue to exert their influence even in the dying hours of this interim government. This government should simply be holding the fort, but instead it has made a highly controversial and rushed decision – a five-year license for both fin and minke whales is a disaster for whales and a disaster for conservation,” Sharon Livermore, Director of Marine Conservation Programmes at the International Fund for Animal Welfare, said in a statement sent to IFLScience.
“Studies have shown that whaling is inherently cruel. There is simply no ethical way to kill a whale at sea.”
Just a few years ago, it looked like Iceland was going to abandon its controversial whaling policy but that no longer appears to be the case.
In June 2023, Icelandic authorities stopped the year’s whaling season one day before it was supposed to start by suspending the hunting of fin whales until the end of summer. The snap decision came after a damning report published by the Icelandic Food and Veterinary Authority suggested whaling often results in the animals suffering long, agonizing deaths, and may break the country’s animal welfare laws.
However, in June 2024, the government revealed it was giving the whaling company Hvalur hf a license to kill 99 fin whales in the Greenland/West Iceland region, as well as 29 whales in the East Iceland/Faroe Islands region.
Along with Iceland, only two other countries — Norway and Japan — continue to practice commercial whaling, defying the global moratorium established by the International Whaling Commission in 1986 despite international backlash.
