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international fund for animal welfare
Losing the Whales: How the Anti-Whaling Narrative Has Failed
The anti-whaling movement has failed to address the issues underpinning international negotiations over whaling, and now faces its greatest defeat.
Sep 16, 2024
Save the Whales. Perhaps the first famous conservation slogan. The end of pelagic commercial whaling was one of the original successes of the conservation movement in international diplomacy. The movement started in the USA, yet now, the two species of whale that are critically endangered are both found in U.S. waters. And we’re about to see the resumption of Antarctic commercial whaling, supported by the U.S. military-industrial-security complex. Crunch time is the meeting of the International Whaling Commission, or IWC later this month. “Lose the whales” is looking more realistic.
To understand how we’ve arrived here, we need to go back to 2010. The year Apple unveiled the first iPad. Taylor Swift released Speak Now. Wikileaks put out the “Collateral Murder” video. U.S. President Barack Obama declared the end of combat operations in Iraq, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced the beginning of the USA’s re-engagement with East Asia. In November 2010, President Obama attended the meeting in Japan of APEC, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum.
While there he had individual meetings with the (then) Prime Ministers of Japan, Naoto Kan, and Australia, Julia Gillard, the USA’s most important allies in the region. At the time, Japan and Australia were at loggerheads over whaling. A few months earlier Australia had started proceedings against Japan at the International Court of Justice that it was, with its “scientific whaling,” in breach of its obligations under the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling (ICRW), the treaty underpinning the IWC. Australia won the case a few years later.
The return of pelagic commercial whaling is imminent.
As part of the movement against whaling, on November 5 2010, conservationists organized the “World Wide Anti-Whaling Day.” In Sydney, Australia, a protest was held at the Japanese Consulate. For the media coverage it received, it may as well not have happened. Concerns about Japanese whaling in Australia’s Antarctic whale sanctuary were running high, so this lack of media interest was unusual. However, the press had just covered another whaling “protest.”
On the evening before, the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) organized a different action. The video remains available. They set up a fake whale in Sydney Harbor with a generic “stop whaling” message. As the video celebrates, this garnered huge coverage in the Australian media, so the action at the consulate the following day got none. Evidence of the conflict over whaling, between these two major U.S. alliesevaporated just in time for the presidential trip to Asia. Instead, the generic, unfocused “stop whaling” message occupied the airwaves. Organizers of the action at the consulate were livid.
Founded in 1969, IFAW was originally a small and effective NGO. It helped establish non-lethal studies as the way to do science on whales. In 1997 IFAW’s founder passed the organization on to a couple of former government officials, ex-senior managers of Peace Corps programs in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Under their direction, IFAW grew rapidly, including by taking over smaller NGOs internationally. Most conservation NGOs are short of money, and IFAW, suddenly rich, absorbed them.
The person who was heading IFAW’s whale program at the time of the stunt in Sydney Harbor has an unusual background for an employee of a conservation NGO. He was originally a German and Russian linguist with U.S. Army intelligence, enlisting in the early 1980s. After the army he moved to Mongoven, Biscoe, and Duchin (MBD), a company that specialized at infiltrating environmental NGOs for corporate clients, as detailed in an academic paper on their work for the tobacco industry. The title—“[MBD]: Destroying Tobacco Control Activism From the Inside”—tells the story. In a move that was the most radical conversion since Paul on the road to Damascus, he then immediately got the job as head of GLOBE USA, a collaborative of global politicians working on environmental issues. He moved to IFAW in 1996, immediately prior to the leadership changeover there. In 2007, coinciding with a U.S. government decision to come up with a process to “solve” issues in the IWC, he was appointed to IFAW’s new position of Global Whale Program Manager. Unlike other IFAW staff, he had little prior experience with the IWC.
The Sydney stunt is just one example, demonstrating how easy it is to direct media stories. IFAW remains the go-to organization for much of the mainstream media on whaling, and other whale conservation issues. IFAW’s messaging controls the anti-whaling narrative.
The anti-whaling movement has been operating under a set of assumptions over the past couple of decades. These include: whaling is a dying industry running on subsidies; acting forcefully against whaling will encourage a backlash in whaling nations; whaling can be replaced with whale-watching as an economic use of whales; and recently, that the Japanese withdrawal from the IWC was an “elegantly Japanese solution” that meant Japanese whalers would never again engage in pelagic whaling. Note that all but one of these links quote IFAW.
Given the new Japanese quotas for killing fin whales, the new ice-strengthened Japanese whaling factory ship, and the call to shut down the IWC, these assumptions are mistaken. Whaling is just one part of much bigger geopolitical machinations that revolve around the U.S. military maintaining its Japanese bases in the face of pubic anger there at the appalling behavior of some service personnel. And then the Japanese government uses access to bases as leverage to winning on whaling, in order to maintain their control over management of other, more important, pelagic fisheries.
Further, the anti-whaling movement has failed to heed warnings of problems in their midst. These were clear after Wikileaks released documents revealing the dealings between the U.S. IWC commissioner, and the Japanese government in 2009. Also clear from the Wikileaks cables is the way in which Australia and Japan’s relationships were impacted by whaling, and how this was a concern for the U.S. government. The NGO community treat this as irrelevant.
That U.S. IWC commissioner? Prior to her return to government, Monica Medina, also ex-military, also worked at IFAW.
On the Wikileaks documents, IFAW’s whale program leader wrote a blog post back in 2011. It includes: “...as I stare back at his face on the WikiLeaks homepage, that Julian Assange—who doesn’t look so well—is on a one-man mission, that the job he is tryin’ to do on us is about something other than saving whales or even promoting transparency in government, and that he really doesn’t much like us—as in U.S.”
The return of pelagic commercial whaling is imminent. The anti-whaling movement has failed to address the issues underpinning international negotiations over whaling, and now faces its greatest defeat. A major NGO focusing on whaling—one to whom many media outlets turn to for comment—has a track record of employing former U.S. military, and military intelligence, staffers. (And not just for whaling). Have these intelligence professionals failed to comprehend the geopolitical issues driving negotiations over whaling?
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When the War on Terror Met Conservation
“Project tenBoma” a program of the International Fund for Animal Welfare that ran from 2015 to 2020, exemplified how military intelligence operations found their way into anti-poaching efforts.
Apr 07, 2024
The image of international conservation organizations is that of teams of well-meaning people—some groups better off than others—struggling against the odds to make the world a better place for nature.
This image took a beating a few years ago from
reporting by investigative journalists working for Buzzfeed News. Most supporters of conservation organizations were presumably shocked by the evidence that a couple of large NGOs had been supporting ranger operations engaged in human right abuses. The information led to a congressional hearing, and those organizations losing some U.S. government funding.
There’s ongoing debate on the appropriateness of militarized conservation programs, with these abuses being particularly egregious examples. Most militarized conservation programs tend to be the equivalent of infantry patrols, with rangers rightly described as “the foot soldiers” of conservation. Another aspect of military operations that has also found its way into conservation programs is intelligence collection, exemplified by “Project tenBoma” a program of the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) that ran from 2015 to 2020. At its launch, this program was described by Azzedine Downes, the president and CEO of IFAW: “We are using the same techniques that were used by military intelligence units to prevent terror attacks in Afghanistan and Iraq to predict and prevent poaching.”
Embedding intelligence officers in conservation organizations creates risks for conservationists.
The aim of the project was to develop an intelligence fusion center to combat wildlife crime. But Project tenBoma did more than just use techniques from U.S. military intelligence. While instances of Western intelligence officers using humanitarian NGOs as covert cover have been reported, Project tenBoma was overt, led by a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force Reserve. This much was made clear in the many, high-profile media reports of the officer’s move into elephant conservation. However, none of these reports convey the impression that this was a short-term deployment. The officer, while employed as a senior vice president at IFAW, was also still serving in the U.S. Air Force Reserve. From the officer's LinkedIn page, her military postings while at IFAW were, initially, chief of ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance) Operations for Special Operations Command Africa (SOCAFRICA), then Africa regional strategy officer for the Joint Staff at the Pentagon. She left IFAW in mid-2019, and resumed her post with SOCAFRICA where she is now deputy chief of staff.
There appears to be complete overlap between the lieutenant colonel’s military duties and her employment at IFAW while working on Project tenBoma. This is, obviously, left out of all the program’s glowing media coverage. Deutsche Welle’s report specifically, and inappropriately, described her military service using the past tense. None of these media outlets have followed up with reporting on the lieutenant colonel’s move back to SOCAFRICA.
As detailed elsewhere, Project tenBoma’s establishment followed concerns expressed by the U.S. national security community that poaching ivory, the “White Gold of Jihad,” was funding terrorism. (It was not.) In early 2014, the Obama White House announced a “National Strategy for Combating Wildlife Trafficking” in which “some terrorist entities” were identified as engaged in the trade of wildlife products. The National Strategy called for a whole-of-government approach to addressing the issue. IFAW announced the launch of Project tenBoma about 12 months later.
Another overlooked aspect of this overlooked story is that there are reports of human rights abuses by rangers of the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS), taking place in the area where Project tenBoma was run, at the time the project was running. Previous reporting has described allegations of human rights abuses by some KWS rangers elsewhere. IFAW’s work in the region where Project tenBoma operated included funding from USAID, so if there is any possibility of Leahy Law violations they could be investigated.
The program was also supported by funding from the Tui Care Foundation and the European Union. Whether either of these organizations (or, for that matter, IFAW’s many individual donors) were aware that they were supporting the activities of a military intelligence program in the name of conservation is unknown. Given the E.U.’s Charter of Fundamental Rights, and commitment to a rights-based approach to development activities, presumably any possible risk that human rights abuses occurred at the same time and place as Project tenBoma would be of interest.
Embedding intelligence officers in conservation organizations creates risks for conservationists. The CIA’s use of a hepatitis vaccination program as a cover in the manhunt for Osama bin Laden led to the deaths of aid workers, demonstrating the severity of these risks. As well, the militarization of engagement by the U.S. in Africa has corresponded with greatly increased violence from terrorism and political unrest recently. If anything is contributing to the problems with terrorism is Africa, it’s the U.S. reliance on military activity as the solution of choice.
To return to that statement by IFAW’s CEO when Project tenBoma began, perhaps the lesson to take from the U.S. experience of Afghanistan and Iraq is that reliance on militarized approaches is not always the most appropriate option.
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'Major Milestone in Compassionate Whale Conservation' as Iceland Suspends Hunt
"There is no humane way to kill a whale at sea, and so we urge the minister to make this a permanent ban," said Humane Society International's Europe director.
Jun 21, 2023
Citing animal welfare concerns, Iceland's government is suspending this summer's whale hunt through the end of August, a move cheered by marine conservationists—who are pressing for a permanent whaling ban.
Icelandic Minister of Food, Agriculture, and Fisheries Svandís Svavarsdóttir—a member of the Left-Green Movement, which leads a three-party ruling coalition—explained Tuesday that "I have made the decision to temporarily stop whaling in light of the unequivocal opinion of the council of animal welfare specialists," according to a translation by Iceland Review.
"The conditions of the Act on Animal Welfare are inescapable in my mind: If the government and license-holders cannot guarantee welfare requirements, this activity does not have a future," she added, raising whaling opponents' hopes for a permanent ban.
\u201c\ud83d\udce2BREAKING: #Iceland has temporarily suspended whaling in response to the diminishing support for this practice. Hvalur, the last remaining whaling company in Iceland, had already declared its final season due to declining profits. \ud83d\udc4f\ud83d\udc33\n\nRead more \ud83d\udc47\nhttps://t.co/fsOYWMOjnT\u201d— Sea Shepherd (@Sea Shepherd) 1687357610
Svavarsdóttir's decision follows the publication this week of a report by the country's Food and Veterinary Authority (MAST) that called last season's whale hunt illegal because it did not meet the standards required by the Icelandic Animal Welfare Act.
"This is a major milestone in compassionate whale conservation. Humane Society International is thrilled at this news and praises Minister Svavarsdóttir for ending the senseless whale killing which will spare hundreds of minke and imperiled fin whales from agonizing and protracted deaths," the advocacy group's Europe executive director Rudd Tombrock said in a statement.
"There is no humane way to kill a whale at sea, and so we urge the minister to make this a permanent ban," Tombrock added. "Whales already face so many serious threats in the oceans from pollution, climate change, entanglement in fish nets, and ship strikes, that ending cruel commercial whaling is the only ethical conclusion."
\u201cHUGE NEWS! Whaling has been BANNED in Iceland till the 31st of August 2023! \ud83d\udc99\ud83d\udc0b\ud83d\udc99 \n\nThe Ethical Review Board came to the conclusion that there is no way to kill whales ethically, and in the light of those findings @svandissvavarsdottir minister decided to stop the whaling season\u201d— Jason Momoa (@Jason Momoa) 1687283964
Speaking after last year's Icelandic whaling season, Sharon Livermore, the director for marine conservation at the Massachusetts-based International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) noted that "studies have shown that it can take up to 25 minutes for a whale to die after being shot with an explosive harpoon."
"This summer, one fin whale was landed with four harpoons in its body. This tragic example indicates that many whales suffer a slow and agonizing death because of whaling," she added. "It is unbearable to imagine how these animals must suffer."
Danny Groves of the U.K.-based group Whale and Dolphin Conservation wrote on Tuesday:
Aside from the issues with the killing methods, the MAST report's expert panel also concluded that it is not possible to determine the sex of a whale from the ship or whether they are about to kill a pregnant female or a lactating mother with a calf. The chances of surviving for motherless whale calves are negligible. Hunting is also not possible without following the whales for some time before shooting, which causes stress and fear, and killing them is not possible in a quick and painless manner.
Referring to Iceland, Robert Read, who heads the U.K. branch of the direct action group Sea Shepherd, said that "if whaling can't be done humanely here... it can't be done humanely anywhere."
"Whales are architects for the ocean," Read added. "They help boost biodiversity, they help fight climate change by affecting the carbon cycling process."
\u201cThere will be no whaling in Iceland this summer! \ud83e\udd73\n\nThis is HUGE!\n\nTogether with the support of other marine charities and a public outcry in Iceland and abroad, we've saved around 150 fin whales from a painful and horrific death this year.\n\nThe Icelandic Government's own advice\u2026\u201d— Whale and Dolphin Conservation (WDC) (@Whale and Dolphin Conservation (WDC)) 1687264902
Last summer, Hvalur—the only whaling company still operating in Iceland—slaughtered 148 fin whales in the frigid Atlantic waters around the island nation. This, despite the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) classifying fin whales as "vulnerable."
The Icelandic government allows the annual slaughter of up to 209 fin whales and 217 minke whales. While the International Whaling Commission (IWC) agreed to a global moratorium on all commercial whaling in 1986, Iceland—which is an IWC member—formally objects to the policy.
IUCN credits bans on whaling—only Iceland, Japan, and Norway allow commercial hunts—for improving the fin whale's status from "endangered" to "vulnerable" in 2018.
Hvalur previously announced that this would be its last whaling season in business, citing a decline in profits, according toEuronews Green.
"Justification is required if whaling is to be allowed," Svavarsdóttir wrote in February 2022. "It must be demonstrated that it is economically justified to renew hunting permits."
"Justification is required if whaling is to be allowed."
The minister asserted that it is "indisputable" that whaling has "not had much economic significance for the national economy in recent years."
"There is little evidence that there is any economic benefit to doing this fishing, as the companies that have a license to do so have been able to catch whales in recent years but have not done it," she continued. "There may be several reasons for this, but perhaps the simplest explanation is that sustained losses from these fisheries are the most likely."
\u201cIt's too soon to tell, but this terrific news could signal an end to whaling in Iceland forever. Fingers crossed. https://t.co/7tFP3e0Ib4\u201d— Blue Planet Society (@Blue Planet Society) 1687271125
When Japan temporarily stopped hunting whales amid international activist pressure, the country imported whale meat from Iceland. However, Svavarsdóttir noted that "the Japanese now hunt their own whale meat."
"Why, she asked, "should Iceland take the risk of maintaining fisheries that have not produced economic benefits in order to sell a product for which there is little demand?"
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