Iceland cancels commercial whaling this season on animal welfare grounds, hailed as ‘a major milestone in compassionate whale conservation’ by HSI / Europe
Minister Svavarsdóttir ends decades of senseless whale killing and begins a new chapter in Iceland’s relationship with whales
Humane Society International / Europe
20 June 2023
BRUSSELS ― As news breaks that Iceland has cancelled this season’s commercial whaling on animal welfare grounds, global animal protection charity Humane Society International says it is thrilled and relieved at the announcement that will spare hundreds of whales from agonising deaths.
It urges the Icelandic government to make it a permanent ban.
Food, Agriculture and Fisheries Minister Svandís Svavarsdóttir announced that Iceland’s whaling vessels will not kill any whales this season due to the conclusion that “the fishing method used when hunting large whales does not comply with the law on animal welfare.”
The suspension lasts until August 31st, which effectively cancels this season’s whale killing.
The minister’s statement continues:
“It is necessary to postpone the start of the whaling season so that there is room to investigate whether it is possible to ensure that the hunting is carried out in accordance with the provisions of the Animal Welfare Act.”
Ruud Tombrock, HSI / Europe’s executive director, said:
“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 imperilled fin whales from agonising and protracted deaths.
There is no humane way to kill a whale at sea and so we urge the minister to make this a permanent ban.
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.”
The announcement follows the Minister’s op-ed last year in which she said she saw little reason to permit whaling after 2023.
Publication last month of an independent report by the Icelandic Food and Veterinary Authority ― commissioned by the Minister ― revealed some whales killed in Icelandic hunts had taken up to two hours to die, with 41% of whales suffering immensely before dying for an average of 11.5 minutes.
Kitty Block, CEO of Humane Society International, said:
“For those of us who have been campaigning for many years to end commercial whaling, to see the day that Iceland decides to stop killing whales and retire its harpoons for good, is truly historic.
Economic factors have certainly played a significant role in the demise of this cruel industry - with little demand for whale meat at home and exports to the Japanese market dwindling - but it is the overriding moral argument against whaling that has sealed its fate.
Harpooning these magnificent giants not only causes unjustifiable suffering to those whales who are killed but also unimaginable distress to the rest of their pod who witness their family members being chased and slaughtered.
Iceland is already one of the best places in the world to go whale watching, and the country stands to attract even more ecotourists now that it has abandoned whaling forever.
The world now looks at Japan and Norway as the only two countries in the world to still mercilessly kill whales for profit.”
FAST FACTS:
The International Whaling Commission agreed to enact a global moratorium on all commercial whaling in 1986.
Iceland left the IWC in 1992 but returned in 2002 with an exception to the moratorium, despite objections from multiple nations.
Since re-joining the IWC, Iceland had killed more than 1,500 whales, including fin whales.
Iceland suspended hunting fin whales in 2016 due to a declining market for whale meat in Japan.
Hunting resumed for the 2018 season when 146 fin whales were killed, including a pregnant female and a rare fin-blue hybrid whale, plus six minke whales.
A single minke whale was killed from 2019-2021, and 148 fin whales in 2022.
Fin whales are classified by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature as globally vulnerable to extinction despite decades of recovery since the commercial whaling moratorium.
🤍🐳🤍
17 notes
·
View notes
"In one of Africa’s last great wildernesses, a remarkable thing has happened—the scimitar-horned oryx, once declared extinct in the wild, is now classified only as endangered.
It’s the first time the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the world’s largest conservation organization, has ever moved a species on its Red List from ‘Extinct in the Wild’ to ‘Endangered.’
The recovery was down to the conservation work of zoos around the world, but also from game breeders in the Texas hill country, who kept the oryx alive while the governments of Abu Dhabi and Chad worked together on a reintroduction program.
Chad... ranks second-lowest on the UN Development Index. Nevertheless, it is within this North African country that can be found the Ouadi Rimé-Ouadi Achim Faunal Reserve, a piece of protected desert and savannah the size of Scotland—around 30,000 square miles, or 10 times the size of Yellowstone.
At a workshop in Chad’s capital of N’Djamena, in 2012, Environment Abu Dhabi, the government of Chad, the Sahara Conservation Fund, and the Zoological Society of London, all secured the support of local landowners and nomadic herders for the reintroduction of the scimitar-horned oryx to the reserve.
Environment Abu Dhabi started the project, assembling captive animals from zoos and private collections the world over to ensure genetic diversity. In March 2016, the first 21 animals from this “world herd” were released over time into a fenced-off part of the reserve where they could acclimatize. Ranging over 30 miles, one female gave birth—the first oryx born into its once-native habitat in over three decades.
In late January 2017, 14 more animals were flown to the reserve in Chad from Abu Dhabi.
In 2022, the rewilded species was officially assessed by the IUCN’s Red List, and determined them to be just ‘Endangered,’ and not ‘Critically Endangered,’ with a population of between 140 and 160 individuals that was increasing, not decreasing.
It’s a tremendous achievement of international scientific and governmental collaboration and a sign that zoological efforts to breed endangered and even extinct animals in captivity can truly work if suitable habitat remains for them to return to."
-via Good News Network, December 13, 2023
23K notes
·
View notes
By Dina Fine Maron
January 24, 2024
Scientists have cleared a significant hurdle in the years-long effort to save Africa’s northern white rhinoceros from extinction with the first-ever rhino pregnancy using in vitro fertilization.
The lab-assisted pregnancy, which researchers will announce today, involved implanting a southern white rhino embryo in a surrogate mother named Curra.
The advance provides the essential “proof of concept” that this strategy could help other rhinos, says Jan Stejskal of the BioRescue project, the international group of scientists leading this research.
Curra died just a couple months into her 16-month pregnancy from an unrelated bacterial infection, Stejskal says.
However, the successful embryo transfer and early stages of pregnancy pave the way for next applying the technique to the critically endangered northern white rhino.
The process was documented exclusively by National Geographic for an upcoming Explorer special currently slated to air in 2025 on Nat Geo and Disney+.
BioRescue expects to soon implant a northern white rhino embryo into a southern white rhino surrogate mother.
The two subspecies are similar enough, according to the researchers, that the embryo will be likely to develop.
Eventually, this approach may also help other critically endangered rhinos, including the Asian Javan rhinoceros and the Sumatran rhinoceros, which each now number under 100 individuals, Stejskal says.
But the northern white rhino’s current situation is the most pressing by far.
There are no males left, and the only two remaining animals are both elderly females that live under armed guard on a reserve in a 700-acre enclosure in Kenya called Ol Pejeta Conservancy.
The boxy-jawed animals once roamed across central Africa, but in recent decades, their numbers have plummeted due to the overwhelming international demand for their horn, a substance used for unproved medicinal applications and carvings.
Made from the same substance as fingernails, rhino horn is in demand from all species, yet the northern white rhino has been particularly hard-hit.
"These rhinos look prehistoric, and they had survived for millions of years, but they couldn’t survive us,” says Ami Vitale, a National Geographic Explorer and photographer who has been documenting scientists’ efforts to help the animals since 2009.
“If there is some hope of recovery within the northern white rhino gene pool — even though it’s a substantially smaller sample of what there was — we haven’t lost them,” says conservation ecologist David Balfour, who chairs the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s African rhino specialist group.
Blueprints for rhino babies
To stave off the animal’s disappearance, BioRescue has used preserved sperm from northern white rhinos and eggs removed from the younger of the two remaining females.
So far, they’ve created about 30 preserved embryos, says Thomas Hildebrandt, the head scientist of BioRescue and an expert in wildlife reproduction based at the Leibniz-Institute of Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin.
Eventually, the team plans to reintroduce northern white rhinos into the wild within their range countries.
“That’d be fantastic, but really, really far from now—decades from now,” says Stejskal.
Worldwide, there are five species of rhinoceros, and many are in trouble.
Across all of Africa, there are now only about 23,000 of the animals, and almost 17,000 of them are southern whites.
Then there are more than 6,000 black rhinos, which are slightly smaller animals whose three subspecies are critically endangered.
In Asia, beyond the critically endangered Javan and Sumatran rhinos, there’s also the greater one-horned rhino, whose numbers are increasing and currently are estimated to be around 2,000.
The BioRescue effort has experienced many setbacks, and even though the team now has frozen embryos, the clock is ticking.
The researchers intend to use southern white rhinos as surrogate moms for the northern white rhino embryos.
However, scientists want any northern white rhino calves to meet and learn from others of their kind, which means they need to be born before the two remaining females die.
“These animals learn behaviors — they don’t have them genetically hard-wired,” says Balfour, who’s not involved with the BioRescue work.
But birthing new animals in time will be a challenge.
“We’re really skating on the edge of what’s possible,” he says, “but it’s worth trying.”
Najin, the older female, will be 35 this year, and Fatu will be 24.
The animals, which were born in a zoo in the Czech Republic, are expected to live to about 40, says Stejskal, who also serves as director of international projects at the Safari Park Dvůr Králové, the zoo where the animals lived until they were brought to Kenya in 2009.
Impregnating a rhino
The next phase of BioRescue’s plan involves implanting one of their limited number of northern white rhino embryos into a southern white rhino surrogate mother — which the group plans to do within the next six months, Stejskal says.
They’ve identified the next surrogate mother and set up precautions to protect her from bacterial infections, including a new enclosure and protocols about disinfecting workers’ boots.
But now, they must wait until the female rhino is in estrus — the period when the animal is ready to mate — to implant the egg.
To identify that prime fertile time, they can’t readily perform regular ultrasounds at the conservancy as they might do in a zoo.
Instead, they have enlisted a rhino bull that has been sterilized to act as a “teaser” for the female, Hildebrandt says, adding that they must wait a few months to make sure that their recently sterilized male is truly free of residual sperm.
Once the animals are brought together, their couplings will alert conservancy staff that the timing is right for reproductive success.
The sex act is also important because it sets off an essential chain of events in the female’s body that boosts the chances of success when they surgically implant the embryo about a week later.
"There’s little chance the conservancy staff will miss the act. White rhinos typically mate for 90 minutes," Hildebrandt says.
What’s more, while mounted on the females, the males often use their temporary height to reach tasty plant snacks that are generally out of reach.
Boosting genetic diversity
With so few northern white rhinos left, their genetic viability may seem uncertain.
But the BioRescue team points to southern white rhinos, whose numbers likely dropped to less than 100, and perhaps even as few as 20, due to hunting in the late 1800s.
Government protections and intense conservation strategies allowed them to bounce back, and now there are almost 17,000.
“They have sufficient diversity to cope with a wide range of conditions,” says Balfour.
Researchers don’t know exactly how many southern white rhinos existed a century ago, he says, but it’s clear that the animals came back from an incredibly low population count and that they now appear healthy.
Beyond their small collection of embryos, the BioRescue team hopes to expand the northern white rhino’s gene pool by drawing from an unconventional source — skin cells extracted from preserved tissue samples that are currently stored at zoos.
They aim to use stem cell techniques to reengineer those cells and develop them into sex cells, building off similar work in lab mice.
According to their plan, those lab-engineered sex cells would then be combined with natural sperm and eggs to make embryos, and from there, the embryos would be implanted into southern white rhino surrogate mothers.
Such stem cell reprogramming work has previously led to healthy offspring in lab mice, Hildebrandt says, but rhinos aren’t as well-studied and understood as mice, making this work significantly challenging.
A global effort
The northern white rhino revitalization venture has cost millions of dollars, supported by a range of public and private donors, including the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research.
Other partners on the effort include the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research, the Czech Republic’s Safari Park, Kenya Wildlife Service, Ol Pejeta Conservancy, and also Katsuhiko Hayashi, a professor of genome biology at Osaka University in Japan who conducted the mouse stem cell research.
Building upon Hayashi’s stem cell techniques could ultimately bring the northern white rhino gene pool up to 12 animals — including eggs from eight females and the semen of four bulls, according to Stejskal.
An alternative approach to making more babies, like crossbreeding northern and southern white rhinos, would mean the resulting calves wouldn’t be genetically pure northern white rhinos, Hildebrandt notes.
The two subspecies look quite similar, but the northern version has subtle physical differences, including hairier ears and feet that are better suited to its swampy habitat.
The two animals also have different genes that may provide disease resiliency or other benefits, Hildebrandt says.
There are unknown potential differences in behavior and ecological impact when populating the area with southern white rhinos or cross-bred animals.
"The northern white rhino is on the brink of extinction really only due to human greed,” Stejskal says.
“We are in a situation where saving them is at our fingertips, so I think we have a responsibility to try.”
🩶🦏🩶
6 notes
·
View notes