AR-News: Officials ask Natives to call off beluga hunt

[jim robertson]

Officials ask Natives to call off beluga hunt

By The Associated Press


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ANCHORAGE — Biologists say so many beluga whales died last year in upper 
Cook Inlet that Alaska Natives should forgo a subsistence hunt next summer.
But representatives of two Cook Inlet Native whale-hunting organizations 
said they have misgivings about suspending the small annual hunt only four 
years after it resumed.

Last year, scientists confirmed the deaths of 20 whales, including five or 
six suspected to have died when 46 whales were stranded in Turnagain Arm on 
Aug. 28.

Under previous agreements between local Natives and the National Marine 
Fisheries Service, the harvest would stop if more than 18 whales die in a 
season.

Formal regulations, however, have not yet been published and made final, 
though they contain the same trigger of 18 whale deaths. As a result, the 
agency has asked Native groups to voluntarily suspend the hunt as part of a 
2004 co-management agreement, said biologist Kaja Brix, chief of protected 
resources in Alaska.

"The decision does not wholly rest in our hands," Brix told the Anchorage 
Daily News. "We did some accounting, and we sent out a letter that we hit 
the trigger in our agreement. ... We're still trying to get some feedback 
from the parties."

Representatives of two Native whale-hunting organizations question whether 
the agency's biologists took into account a recent surge in baby belugas.

More belugas swim in Cook Inlet than scientists may realize, said Peter 
Merryman, head of the Cook Inlet Marine Mammal Council and traditional chief 
of the Athabascan village of Tyonek.

"Every spring we see more calves," he said. "It's not our fault that they 
died naturally (in 2003), and why should we suffer?"

The depleted whales are thought to number 350 to 400 in one of the smallest 
genetically isolated cetacean populations in the world. Once thought to 
number 1,300, the belugas plunged to an estimated 347 by 1998 in a decline 
federal biologists blamed on overhunting by Alaska Natives.


http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2001885085_whales22.html





Compassion, in which all ethics must take root, can only attain its full 
breadth and depth if it embraces all living creatures and does not limit 
itself to humankind.
Dr. Albert Schweitzer, Nobel Peace Prize winner

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