Call for monitoring of Solomons dolphin hunt

FANALEI – The South Pacific Whale Research Consortium are calling for more scientific monitoring of traditional dolphin hunting practices in Solomon Islands.

In 2010, The Earth Island Institute was able to negotiate a moratorium on the practice with dolphin hunting tribes. But the agreement fell apart in 2013 and the ensuing hunt saw more than 1500 dolphins killed in the space of a few months. An associate director of the Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State University and Auckland University adjunct professor,

Scott Baker, was part of a team that documented the mass dolphin killings in 2013. He says there is simply not enough data kept of the ongoing hunting practice. “We found evidence from the hunters records of 1500 dolphins killed just in the fi rst few months of the hunting season for 2013. We also took the opportunity to examine older catch records and that allowed us to summarise – at least for the village of Fanalei – their total catch record over the last thirty years or more. And it was a pretty astounding number – more than 15,000 dolphins.

“Of course we are concerned with animal welfare issues but we are primarily concerned with the potential for the depletion of the local population. And in that we had, I think, some sympathy from the local hunters. “I mean the local hunters are obviously knowledgeable about their own resources and they realise that the numbers they are taking may not be sustainable.

“But there is not the kind of information that would inform any kind of management or a policy because there’s not good estimates of abundance or even a good understanding of the local population structure for these species.”

He says the consortium is calling for a study to fi nd out how many dolphins there are, what kind of dolphins they are and what’s a manageable number.

“I think we are raising the alarm that these are large numbers of dolphins taken from coastal populations that may well be relatively localised and so not terribly abundant.

“The government of the Solomon Islands has actually been very supportive of this work but their resources are not suffi cient to gather the kinds of information you’d really need for an adequate management plan. “We would like to see support in some form that would allow the Solomon Islands government to access that kind of information that would be required.

“There are some intermediate steps to improved documentation of the hunt itself and that seemed to be consistent with the views of the hunters as well. They certainly were generous in sharing their records with us. “But having a better understanding of the numbers and the species and better documentation – they keep local records but really there should be a probably a more systematic process by which the each year’s hunts are recorded for each of the villages.

“And that would probably require, you know some assistance to the Solomon Islands government, at least in terms of advice about how to structure this kind of a management plan. “We make the point that hunting of small cetaceans – that is dolphins and the small whales – is not actually controlled by any international convention. “That is something that a lot of people are probably unaware of – because the international controversy over whaling has had so much public attention and that is of course controlled by the International Whaling Commission under an international convention. “That convention doesn’t specifi cally exclude small cetaceans but the member nations of the IWC currently are not willing to consider it has competency to advise on the hunting of small cetaceans.”

Baker was asked if from a scientifi c point of view he was condemning the traditional dolphin hunting activities or was he saying if it was going to continue happening it is better to have good data and manage the resource properly?

“Well, I believe that really is a decision for the Solomon Islands government. Although I don’t doubt that they would take world opinion into account – suppose they have to reconcile themselves to the fact that hunting dolphins is not popular internationally. “Our role scientifi cally is really to provide advice and in this case, also to raise concerns about the conservation issues. “The welfare issues I think have been pretty well addressed or are reasonably well known. The hunt is probably pretty brutal and a considerable cause of suffering for the animals – I don’t think anyone disputes that.”

Asked about the sustainability of the dolphin hunting tradition in the Solomon Islands, Baker said: “The species that are being hunted are widely distributed and generally abundant but what we have learned over the last decade or two studying populations in islands throughout Oceania is that they tend to form these local coastal populations or insular island dependent populations .

“And so you would have to have an extremely abundant local population to be able to sustain this kind of a hunt.”