Extra: A Modern Whaler Speaks Up (Update)

Hey there, it's Stephen Dubner. We just republished a three-part series called Everything You Never Knew About Whaling. We spoke with economists, historians, Moby Dix scholar, and an environmental activist whose mission in life is to stop whale hunting. We also tried to speak with a whale hunter, but public sentiment against whaling is so strong that most modern whalers don't want to speak with the press. Also, there just aren't that many whalers around anymore.

In the 1960s, at the peak of industrial whale hunting, thousands of whalers in more than a dozen countries were killing tens of thousands of whales a year. Today, commercial whaling happens in only three countries. Norway, Iceland, and Japan, and collectively they only kill about a thousand whales a year. There just isn't much demand for whale meat, it turns out, and even less for whale oil. Anyway, we couldn't get a modern whaler to go on the record with us, but then, right as we were finishing our series, we landed our white whale, Bjorn Andersen, one of the biggest whalers in Norway.

The Norwegian government allows for the harvest of 14 1,800 minka whales a year. The minka is plentiful, it's not at all an endangered species. Even so, Anderson and his fellow whalers usually take less than half of the allowed quota each year. Like I said, just not much demand for whale meat these days.

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