We need to talk about whaling

On June 22, a fin whale was shot in the hunting grounds between Iceland and Greenland. The first harpoon hit, and the animal rolled onto its back, sank, and appeared to be dead. It was hanging from the line when it surfaced again six minutes later, still alive. It took three more shots and roughly half an hour before it finally died.

Eight days after that whale died, the tenth animal of the season was hauled up the ramp at the whaling station in Hvalfjörður. Someone in the crowd on the dock switched on the loudspeakers, and Iceland’s national anthem played out over the carcass while it was winched ashore. Men shouted áfram Ísland!—go Iceland!—the kind of thing you’d hear at a football match. One of the whaling station’s workers picked up the dead animal’s penis and swung it toward the news camera, then posed for a photo holding it.

Iceland’s minister of industry, who oversees fisheries, watched the footage and asked the men to behave, in her words, like grown adults. It was not, she said, the kind of conduct that reflects well on the nation abroad. (As though that were the main issue.)

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Here it would be easy to make this into a story about a few ignorant asshats on a dock, but unfortunately it is much bigger than that. The real story is about the fact that there is one man—an individual in his eighties—who has the right to hunt whales in Iceland, a right handed to him by a single political party that has been in power almost consistently for the last eight decades.

That man’s name is Kristján Loftsson and he owns Hvalur hf., the one company in Iceland licensed to hunt fin whales. Loftsson has held that license, in one form or another, since commercial whaling resumed in 2006 (nb. prior to that date Iceland hunted whales under the pretext of “scientific research”).

Fin whales are the second largest animals on the planet and are classified as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Iceland is one of three countries left that still hunts them commercially, alongside Japan and Norway.

Hvalur hf. loses money most years and has for a long time. What keeps it afloat is that Loftsson also owns one of Iceland’s largest fishing operations, HB Grandi, built on the quota system that hands a fixed share of the nation’s fish stocks to a small number of companies, essentially forever. That is a large, overarching topic in and of itself, and in fact quite incredible not only in its innate corruptness, but also in how impossible it has been to wrest that system from the hands of a few wealthy individuals and back into the hands of the people.

Briefly: the fish in Icelandic waters belong, on paper, to the nation. In practice they belong to the handful of families who were allocated quotas decades ago and have been trading and inheriting them ever since. (If you can get a hold of, or stream, the series Verbúðin, Blackport in English, about the inital implementation of the quota system, I highly recommend it.)

Icelanders call these people “quota kings”, with the sort of droll resentment you reserve for something you’ve stopped expecting to change. The Independence Party has protected this system through every government it has led, and the families who hold the quotas have returned the favor with the money that keeps that party’s campaigns funded. Loftsson sits comfortably inside that arrangement. When his whaling license needed renewing in 2024, it was renewed for five years, automatically extending every year after that without further review, on the signature of a fisheries minister from the Independence Party.

And the insane thing is … there is almost no market for what Loftsson is selling. Icelanders don’t eat whale meat in any real quantity. The people who order it are mostly tourists in restaurants, possibly thinking they are partaking of “Icelandic tradition” and not understanding that this is novelty. Most of what Hvalur has produced in past seasons has gone to Japan, where demand has been falling as Japan’s own whaling fleet expands. There is a real possibility that this year’s catch, like recent ones, will sit in a freezer with no buyer at all, or wind up being made into pet food.

So the obvious question is: why. Why does a belligerent geriatric man keep ordering the killing of a vulnerable species, at a loss, for a product almost nobody wants, using a method that his own government’s veterinary authority has documented as failing to meet Iceland’s animal welfare standards? And dragging Iceland’s reputation through the mud while he’s at it, with absolute defiance and impunity?

Before I get to that analysis, a brief note: I keep writing about people like Kristján Loftsson and the Independence Party as though their power were self-evident, almost like a force of nature. But it’s not self-evident. I think there’s a reason Icelanders keep watching men like this override the public will, and I don’t think the reason is apathy. It’s more a habit of deference built into people who grew up in households and systems where questioning authority was unsafe—something learned generations ago and never unlearned. I explore this further in my webinar on Iceland’s hidden emotional history, Life Under Vistarband.

Check it out here

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