The Animal Welfare Institute's (AWI's) Sept. 30 advertisement "Save the Whales!" calling for sanctions against Norway, does violence to the truth by claiming that the Scientific Committee of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) "reaffirmed the protected status for minke whales." On the contrary, the minke whale is not at all endangered. As reported last June in the prestigious journal Science, the IWC committee recommended lifting the 1985 moratorium on minke whaling after calculating safe numbers for harvesting. The committee chairman, Philip Hammond, resigned over the IWC's refusal to accept the advice of its own panel, thus "favoring politics over science."

The AWI and other animal-rights grouts are now urging President Clinton to impose trade sanctions on Norway for permitting fishermen to take 296 of the 90,000 or so minke whales in its coastal waters, which is about one-tenth of the world's total 1 million whales. The administration should heed the U.S. Marine Mammal Protection Act to "determine the status of whales, porpoises and seals with respect to their optimum sustainable populations [emphasis added]— language that clearly permits harvesting according to scientific principle.

Any action against Norway thus has no scientific basis; it may also be illegal under the convention that established the IWC. It almost certainly violates international trade agreements such as GATT, and can have serious foreign-policy consequences if interpreted as the bullying of a small nation by a superpower.

To those who argue that whaling should be banned because it violates their sense of ethics, the response must be: We respect your sentiments, but where does one draw the line? Should we outlaw all fishing and hunting? Should we boycott the French for eating horsemeat and the Italians for eating songbirds. At issue here is not only the integrity of science in general but also the use of scientific methods to manage renewable natural resources such as fisheries for sustainable develop- ment.