Moscow: Dozens of orcas and beluga whales captured for sale to oceanariums have brought Russia’s murky trade into the spotlight, but efforts to free them are blocked by government infighting. Russia is the only country where orcas, or killer whales and belugas can be caught in the ocean for the purpose of “education”. The legal loophole has been used to export them, especially to satisfy demand in China’s growing network of ocean theme parks.
The practice sparked a global outcry after pictures surfaced of an unprecedented number of the marine mammals — a total of 11 orcas and 87 belugas — crammed into small enclosures at a secure facility in the Far Eastern town of Nakhodka.
“There have never been that many animals caught in one season and kept in the same facility before anywhere in the world,” said Dmitry Lisitsyn, head of the Sakhalin Environmental Watch group who has emerged as a point person in the campaign to release the whales captured last summer back into the wild.
Under public pressure, Russian investigators launched two probes into poaching and cruel treatment of the whales, while Russia’s environmental watchdog said it has refused to issue permits to export them.
But the investigations and any potential court case could drag on for months.
And a major hurdle remains in the Russian government which is split between the environment ministry that says the animals must be urgently released, and the fisheries agency that defends their capture as part of a legitimate industry.
The captured killer whales belong to the rarer seal-eating, or transient, population of the species, which does not interbreed or interact with fish-eating orcas.
The environment ministry has tried to list the seal-eating type as endangered, ministry representative Olga Krever said.
“This population has only 200 adult animals” in Russian waters, she said.
But the agriculture ministry, which controls the fisheries agency and oversees non-protected sea species, views orcas as a dangerous competitor for Russia’s fish stocks and doesn’t believe they are under threat, Krever said, calling the dispute a “big problem.”
The heads of the two ministries could sit down and decide the fate of the Nakhodka animals quickly as “this needs a political solution,” she said.
But while marine mammal researchers say there are good chances of a successful release, the fisheries agency said that releasing the captured animals “carries high risks of their mass death”. “Neither orcas nor belugas are endangered,” and are simply a resource that can be used according to existing legislation, agency representative Sergei Golovinov said.
The high-profile clash became heated at a Moscow conference last week where Alexander Pozdnyakov, a fishing lobbyist tied to firms keeping the animals in Nakhodka, suddenly linked it to Russia’s geopolitical struggle with the United States.
“Today there is a battle for the Chinese market,” Pozdnyakov said. If the Nakhodka animals are not delivered there, “this market will be taken over by American firms.”
— AFP
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