A contemporary whaling vessel — like Japan's Kangei Maru, a purpose-built 9,300-ton "mothership" launched in 2024 to replace its aging predecessor — carries explosive harpoons mounted on deck guns. When a whale is spotted, often with the aid of sonar and spotters, the ship closes in and fires a harpoon tipped with a penthrite grenade designed to detonate inside the animal. The whale is then winched to the vessel by ropes — the scene captured in the photograph that prompted this article — hauled alongside or up a stern slipway, and processed aboard.
Proponents, including the whaling nations' regulators, argue that modern methods are designed to minimize suffering, with regulations specifying time-to-death standards and improved grenade designs. Iceland, for instance, introduced stricter requirements on equipment and methods in recent years, aimed at killing whales as quickly as possible.
But the welfare science tells a more complicated story. Studies of time-to-death in whaling have consistently shown wide variation: many whales die within seconds or minutes, but a significant fraction take far longer — sometimes tens of minutes — to die, including animals struck and lost entirely. For a creature with a large, complex brain, that interval matters morally in a way it does not for simpler organisms. And unlike slaughterhouses, which operate under inspection regimes (however imperfect), whaling happens at sea, far from independent observers.
The Indigenous subsistence hunts use similar harpoon technology but in a radically different context: small crews in open boats, hunting single animals, with the entire community participating in the landing and sharing. The scale — dozens of animals per community per year, every part used — bears no resemblance to the industrial model. Conflating the two because both involve a harpoon misses nearly everything that matters about either.
The three holdouts
Japan, Norway, and Iceland — these are the three nations that have continued to kill whales for commercial purposes despite the moratorium, and together they have taken roughly 45,000 whales since 1986.
Each country's position is legally distinct. Norway and Iceland remain members of the IWC but hunt under formal objection or reservation to the moratorium, operating within their national waters. Norway targets minke whales, killing more than 400 in a typical recent year. Iceland has targeted both minke whales and fin whales — the second-largest animal on Earth — with its sole remaining whaling company, Hvalur hf., killing 148 fin whales as recently as 2022.
Japan's path was more dramatic. For decades after the moratorium, Japan continued whaling in the Antarctic under the banner of "scientific research" — a program that conservationists and the International Court of Justice regarded as commercial whaling in all but name. Then, in 2019, Japan took the extraordinary step of leaving the IWC entirely, freeing itself to hunt commercially within its own Exclusive Economic Zone. It now targets minke, Bryde's, sperm, and fin whales, with authorized catches exceeding 400 animals per year.
Yet the economics of whaling are collapsing even where the practice survives. In Japan, whale meat consumption peaked in 1962 at 226,000 tons; by 2017, it had fallen to just 3,000 tons. Young Japanese consumers have little interest in the product, and stockpiles of unsold meat have repeatedly made headlines. In Iceland, the economics are even starker: Hvalur hf. cancelled its 2024 and 2025 hunting seasons, with CEO Kristján Loftsson citing adverse economic conditions — inflation and low prices in the Japanese export market made hunting, in his words, unjustifiable. Icelanders themselves largely oppose the hunts, and legislation that could permanently prohibit commercial whaling from 2027 is under consideration.
At the IWC's 70th meeting in Hobart in 2025 — forty years after the moratorium took effect — pro-whaling nations made their third consecutive failed attempt to begin overturning the ban. The moratorium held. But so did the hunts.
The Indigenous exception
Separate from the commercial hunts is a category the IWC calls "aboriginal subsistence whaling" — hunts carried out by Indigenous peoples for local consumption, rooted in continuing traditional dependence on whales. This is where the debate over "no exceptions" becomes most difficult, because these hunts look nothing like industrial whaling.
The most prominent example is the bowhead whale hunt of the Iñupiat and Yupiit peoples of Alaska's North Slope. These communities have hunted bowheads for well over a thousand years, and the hunt remains central to their culture, spirituality, and food security. The meat and blubber feed entire villages; the hunt itself structures the social calendar; the sharing of the catch reinforces community bonds that have held for generations.
The legal history is dramatic. In 1977, the IWC abruptly banned the bowhead hunt, voting 16 to 0 to remove "right whales" — a category that includes bowheads — from the aboriginal exemption. The North Slope communities, who had not been meaningfully consulted, were devastated. In response, whaling captains from nine villages formed the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission (AEWC) and successfully lobbied for the hunt's restoration. Since 1981, the AEWC has co-managed the hunt with the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) under strict IWC quotas.
Those quotas are conservative and science-based. For the 2026–2031 period, the IWC allows a total of up to 336 bowhead whales to be landed from the Bering-Chukchi-Beaufort Seas stock, with no more than 67 struck in any year — numbers calculated by the IWC's Scientific Committee to ensure the stock keeps growing. The bowhead population, once depleted, has in fact been recovering under this management. Similar regulated subsistence hunts exist for gray whales (taken by the Indigenous peoples of Chukotka and Washington State's Makah Tribe, up to 840 over the 2026–2031 period), minke and bowhead whales taken by Greenlanders, and a small hunt in St. Vincent and the Grenadines.