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| Photo by Paul Nicklen |
With a population of about 80,000
narwhals in the region and annual hunting quotas of just 700 animals, hunting
by the Inuit communities should not be causing a decline in the narwhal
populations in the area. But government
biologists were concerned enough about hunting pressures to enact the ban, so
there are probably other issues at play.
One issue that should be in play but doesn’t appear to have been
included in the negotiations to lift the ban is the issue of those narwhals
that are “struck and lost.” Because
narwhals are known to sink when they die, Canadian narwhal hunters using rifles
to hunt the whales are known to kill far more narwhals than they recover. And
those that are struck and lost are not counted toward the quota.
An
article in National Geographic magazine in 2007 by photographer Paul Nicklen, who grew up among the Inuit on Baffin Island,
graphically illustrates the problem and suggests that hunting practices may
need to be reviewed and recordkeeping expanded. He wrote that during one 12 hour span, he
counted 109 rifle shots but just nine narwhals were recovered. One hunter reported that he killed seven
narwhals, all of which sank. “This was
not the first time I had heard reports of many narwhals being shot but few
landed. Just weeks earlier, a man I know
to be a skillful hunter confided that he had killed 14 narwhals the previous
year but managed to land only one… So much ivory rests on the seafloor, said
one hunter, that a salvager could make a fortune,” wrote Nicklen.
At
the very least, Nicklen’s observation suggests that wildlife managers should be
paying much closer attention to narwhal hunting and, rather than banning the
export of tusks should perhaps lower the quotas until a better system can be
developed for accurately tracking the number of narwhals killed by
hunters.
There
are plenty of arguments that have been made to eliminate any harvest of
narwhals in Canada – including a lack of confidence in the government’s narwhal
population estimates, the unfair advantage that hunters with rifles have over
the defenseless animals, Canada’s unwillingness to follow the recommendations
of the International Whaling Commission, and the belief, outlined in the
recently drafted Declaration of Rights for Cetaceans, that whales have
complex minds and societies and should be treated more like people than
animals. Having spent time among the Inuit and knowing the importance narwhals
play in their culture and health and subsistence, I am not ready to argue that
hunting should be banned entirely. But I am convinced that the way it is taking
place in Canada today is unsustainable and should be thoroughly reassessed.
