The HSUS House of Horrors Presents ...
The Living Dead (Whale)

By Simon Ward

Better known for its grisly stories of "puppy mills" and the horsemeat trade, the Humane Society of the US wants to write a new chapter in the annals of the macabre. So stomach-churning is their incredible tale that it will have Norwegians and Japanese heading for their freezers with a hammer in hand.

But relax, readers. It's only Hollywood! Well, OK, the IWC.

At last year's IWC, HSUS managed to place a rather unsavoury character on the US delegation (see "Whale Expert ..."). David Wills, representing HSUS's international arm, Humane Society International, came armed with a paper entitled "Scientific Considerations for Opposing the Killing of Whales of Ethical Grounds." As co-author of this paper, Wills wished to present it to the Workshop on Whale Killing Methods.

In essence, the paper argued that whales, even after assaults with harpoons, guns and electric lances, could be sentient - and therefore experience fear and pain - long after they appear by any conventional standards of measurement to be dead. Because of the "deep dive cycle" exhibited by great whales, their oxygen supply system could be sufficiently different from other land mammals to allow the brain to receive oxygen even after the whale's heart has stopped.

No Thanks

Wills managed to make it onto the US delegation, but that was where his luck stopped. The other delegates (the real ones, that is) took one look at his paper and refused to endorse it, which meant he could not present it to the Workshop.

Not to worry, thought Wills, and turned up at the Workshop anyway. Without naming his paper (that would have been against the rules), he nonetheless managed to force a discussion of his views for long enough to have them included in the Workshop report.

It was now official: a US delegate at the Workshop had raised the possibility that whales could look as dead as you like and still be ticking.

For undiscriminating whale-lovers, that was the green light for another scare story.

Carole Carlson, IWC representative of Cetacean Society International, reported in the society's newsletter (July 1995): "The moment of death of a whale cannot be determined and this has been a matter of controversy since the 1960s. This problem was brought to light by a presentation by David Wills ... Wills' studies indicate that a whale, no longer struggling, or with a slacked jaw or limp flippers may be alive and fully conscious. According to Wills, 'the wounded creature is likely to be sensible and aware beyind the time of appearance of death, and is therefore capable of experiencing both fear and physical distress for significant amounts of time.'

Germany's Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung also picked it up, earning a sharp rebuke in the letters page from Workshop participant Bernhard Neurohr (May 31, 1995).

"It was no accident," wrote Neurohr, that Wills's paper was "rejected as a scientific basis for the workshop ... and accordingly not even discussed but merely exhibited by the Animal Protection League as an 'information paper' in the lobby."

"No Merit"

"The main weakness of this paper," continued Neurohr, "lies in its assertion, which cannot be substantiated, that whales' brains are still being supplied with oxygen after the blood circulation in the rest of the body has failed. Unquestionably, however, the brain can only be supplied with oxygen by circulating blood. This is a physiological truism; without circulating oxygen even a whale brain dies."

Harpoon asked Lars Walløe, Norway's senior scientist at the IWC and another Workshop participant, whether he felt the paper had any merit.

"No merit," he replied, laughing. "This was the unanimous opinion of the workshop. Wills didn't get any support from anyone. When the heart stops, there is no pumping capacity, and the brain of the whale will last no longer than that of a human."

Then why, if his views were so outlandish, were they ever included in the Workshop report? Because no rule obliges the rapporteur of a Workshop to exclude statements from the report which are scientifically accurate. Wills surely knew this, and exploited it.

Silent Americans

What was surprising was that no other member of the US delegation at the Workshop tried to stop Wills from spinning his fantasy.

The simple fact that Wills addressed the Workshop as a US delegate meant that he had been endorsed by the US commissioner as someone qualified to speak. Yet Norwegian scientists assure the Harpoon that if one of their colleagues were to start talking nonsense, they would intervene and ask him or her to sit down.

"I would be angry," said Walløe, "for wasting our time and embarrassing our country. If I had been an American in that meeting, I don't think I could have contained myself."

Wills has been fired now, so the story of the "living dead" whale will hopefully be laid to rest. But the US government and the HSUS must bear the responsibility for scaring us all out of our wits.

Or is HSUS still sticking to its story?

If You Believe This ...

After David Wills managed to get his "living dead" theory into an IWC Workshop report, not a few whale-savers and media organs swallowed this gobbledygook whole:

"Given the complex adaptations whales have evolved in order to dive and function at great depths, it is reasonable to suggest that even when the severely traumatized whale appears motionless and still, the physiological functions of the dive cycle may be engaged, and the brain may have enough oxygen stores to continue to function cognitively for lengths of time possibly approaching those of even the prolonged dive cycle." (From "Scientific Considerations for Opposing the Killing of Whales of Ethical Grounds," Humane Society International, 1995)

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