Whale Watching on the Rise in America

ByABC News
August 22, 2000, 3:20 PM

B O S T O N, Aug. 22 -- Hunting whales is out. Watching whales is in.

Whale watching is booming worldwide as more countries get in onthe lucrative business of bringing landlubbers out to see marinemammals, according to a Massachusetts conservation group’s study.

“This is beginning to have a dramatic impact on communitiesaround the world,” said study author Erich Hoyt, who has done twoprevious studies on whale watching. “We see this as a verypositive development in terms of communities finding ways ofsupporting themselves.”

The study from the Cape Cod-based International Fund for AnimalWelfare reports that whale watching doubled between 1994 and 1998.The industry is now flourishing in some 500 communities in at least87 countries, up from only 31 in 1991.

World Whale Watch Leader

The United States is still the world leader in whale watching,accounting for almost half of the 9 million people who crowdeddecks to watch whales and dolphins in 1998.

The growth of whale-watching, said IFAW program director KarenSteuer, is because of the lure of “charismatic mega-fauna”:elephants, whales, giraffes and the like.

But there’s also growing awareness of conservation and thegrowth of “eco-tourism” worldwide, she said.

“Countries worldwide are starting to recognize the value ofanimal tourism, if you will,” Steuer said.

And what caught researchers’ attention in the study was thatwhale watching is on the rise in countries that historically havenot shied away from hunting whales, which is practiced in Japan andNorway despite an international ban.

Iceland, a country that only stopped hunting whales in the late1980s, had among the largest explosion of whale watching — a leapfrom 200 people in 1994 to 30,300 in 1998.

The reason, according to Steuer, is a matter of simple math:“Whales are worth a lot more live than they are dead.”

Similarly, Japan has also seen its whale watching industrydouble. Japan is still one of the few nations that allows whaling,hunting about 500 whales each year, according to the IFAW.