IWMC congratulates the New York Times and reporter Nicholas D. Kristof for his reporting skill and insights in the September 17th, "Whale on the Table" piece. Kristof described the scene in Kaktovik, Alaska, as villagers towed a 43-foot Bowhead onto the beach with a bulldozer. The entire town suspended other activities, including school and business in the US Post Office, while the animal was landed and butchering operations began. All 270 people gathered and celebrated by sharing initial cuts of muktuk, (skin with attached blubber), some plain, and some with modern condiments such as A1 sauce or ketchup. Children danced on the whale carcass, while one man fired his gun in the air to discourage circling hungry polar bears. What a scene! The village had landed the first of its allotted three Bowheads for the season. The food is now, and has always been, a staple in the diet of Inupiat people.

Although Kristof jokes about how this could be an example of a new diet craze, and about how such a diet would surely cause weight loss in "lower 48" Americans, his coverage of the event was anything but critically narrow. The main thrust of the piece, aside from the joyful description of a village celebrating its immense good fortune, was to contrast the scene with US foreign policy on other nations' whaling cultures, and those peoples' right to hunt and consume whales.

Nicholas Kristof astutely comments on US hypocrisy in this matter: American Natives such as the Inupiat and the Makah are granted their traditional rights to hunt whales. In the case of the Makah, their prey is the now unendangered gray whale, back to its original pre-exploitation strength on the US West Coast. In the case of the Inupiat, the Bowhead is still highly endangered, but its strength at an estimated 10,000 animals is not affected by the small yet vitally important aboriginal subsistence harvest.

Kristof contrasts this American whale harvest policy with the American insistence that Japanese, Norwegian, and Icelandic hunters must not even consider harvest of unendangered, highly prolific, one-million-strong minke whales. Where is the sense of international respect for social justice in this reality?

Kristof's piece, and the fact that the New York Times printed it, may be an indication that even the liberal media are finally realizing that there is something wrong with this inexplicable picture. The conservation of any wildlife resource depends on two things: One is continuing scientific research into the resource and its habitat, and the other is a program of on going law enforcement that oversees the harvest, and ensures that rules of the allowed take are honored.

Neither of these factors changes with the intent of the harvesters. Both aboriginal subsistence and commercial harvest can potentially affect the stability and future of a hunted resource, and the safety of the resource in any case depends on both research and oversight. Norway, Japan and Iceland all agree to these principles. All insist that scientific research is a necessary part of any harvest plan, and all have indicated a willingness to openly reveal the details of whale research and official oversight of the hunt by their citizens. The fact that some people who wish to utilize whale products are aboriginal subsistence hunters, and some are commercial hunters making a living through this means, does not mean that one group should be allowed to celebrate their lifestyle, while the other should be harshly and forever prevented from doing so. Congratulations to Nicholas Kristof and the New York Times for a poignant description of this world-scale conservation issue.