Obama presses Iceland over fin whale hunt

From Andrew Revkin at the NYT:

On Thursday, President Obama ordered government agencies to ramp up pressure on Iceland to end its slaughter of endangered fin whales, the second largest whale species. But the president stopped short of imposing trade sanctions. He issued a Message to Congress with the details, including this passage:

Of particular concern to the United States, Iceland harvested 125 endangered fin whales in 2009 and 148 in 2010, a significant increase from the total of 7 fin whales it commercially harvested between 1987 and 2007.

This is what that harvest looks like (video from Greenpeace):

Read it all here at NYTimes.com.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 18th, 2011 at 7:24 am. It is filed under Environment and tagged with whales. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.