Last week, at London's luxurious Waldorf Hotel, delegates from 15 countries gathered to pass sentence of death on the world's few remaining whales.
The International Whaling Commission's annual meeting ended on Friday amid bitter protests from conservationists who argue that today's whales will be tomorrow's dinosaurs unless the killing stops.
Delivering a broadside from the World Wildlife Fund, Sir Peter Scott said it was wholly wrong that the future of the great whales should be decided by their exploiters. "The world's whales do not belong to the members of this commission," thundered Sir Peter.
Dodging verbal harpoons flung by Friends of the Earth and other like-minded folk who prefer live whales to lipstick and engine oil, the IWC once again refused to accept the 10-year ban on whaling which many experts believe is the only way to save the species from extinction.
The call for a 10-year moratorium was first proposed at the UN Conference on the Human Environment at Stockholm in 1982, when it won overwhelming support. But the IWC has refused to bow to world opinion, although not without some dissent among its members. In 1974 the Mexican delegate said that if the moratorium were not soon introduced, "this Commission will be known to history as a small body of men who failed to act responsibly ╔ and who protected the interests of a few whalers and not the future of thousands of whales."
The IWC has had a sorry story. It was set up in 1946 after years of reckless over-exploitation had already driven some species to the brink of extinction. Its aims: "To provide for the conservation, development and optimum utilisation of the whale resources."
Presumably with optimum utilisation in mind, one of its first decisions was to lift the total ban on the killing of humpback whales, which were then earnestly pursued to the point of commercial extinction.
Similarly, the IWC failed utterly to protect the blue whale. This gentle giant, the biggest animal ever to inhabit the earth (it can weigh as much as 30 elephants), once roamed the oceans in vast herds, grazing on plankton as peaceably as diary cows.
Despite a warning in 1955 from the IWC's own scientific committee that stocks might already have passed the point of no return, the slaughter of the blues continued. When full protection at last came a decade later, the blue whale was, like the humpback, commercially extinct.
As one species after another found its way on to the danger list, the whaling fleets fell upon the remaining unprotected herds of the 80ft fin whale, the 60ft sei whale, the much smaller minke whale - and above all on the majestic sperm whale, whose huge blunt forehead contains the spermaceti wax, much sought after by manufacturers of cosmetics.
Now these species, too, are declining at a frightening rate. The fin whale in particular is rapidly approaching the point of commercial extinction and, by the IWC's own admission, the fleets were unable to find enough sei and sperm whales to fill last year's quotas.
That is why conservation groups like Friends of the Earth want the IWC replaced by a UN convention. In their eyes the IWC is a toothless and discredited body, incapable of withstanding the commercial and political pressures of the member whaling nations. The main culprits are Japan and Russia, who between them account for the bulk of the annual quota. The Japanese eat most of their catch (although whale meat accounts for only 0.8 per cent of their total protein intake). The Russians render their whales down into space-craft lubricants or else sell the by-products for hard Western currency.
One of the saddest aspects of the affair has been Britain's continuing involvement. Although no longer a whaling nation (our whalers helped deplete blue whale stocks to such good effect that they put themselves out of business), we are still one of the IWC's 15 member-countries.
At Stockholm in 1972, Britain voted for a moratorium on all commercial whaling. Yet the following year, when Britain banned the import of baleen whale products and sperm whale meat, it was made quite clear that the ban did not apply to sperm whale oil, which still flows into this country at the rate of some 8,000 metric tons a year.
Without it, we are assured, the wheels of British industry would grind to a halt. In particular it would cause awful problems to the leather industry - even though perfectly good alternatives exist, and America has managed to impose a total ban on whale products.
In any case, we are informed by Mr Edward Bishop, Minister of State for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, there are lots of sperm whales still awaiting slaughter. But then, Mr Bishop is also on record as having denied that killing whales with explosive harpoons is cruel. And before you swallow that one, consider exactly what happens to a hunted whale.
If the Geneva Convention applied to whaling, it would certainly outlaw the modern harpoon. This terrible weapon weighs 160lb and strikes at 60mph. It has four barbed warheads fitted with a grenade which is exploded inside the whale by a time-fuse. The effect is as of a giant shrapnel umbrella opening in the belly. Even then instant death is rare. It has been known for shattered victims to thrash around for an hour or more in the most intense agony, and further shots are sometimes required to finish the job.
After man, whales are the most intelligent creatures on earth. Like us they are warm-blooded, breath air, feel pain, suckle their young and stay faithful to their mates, even in death. They are gentle and gregarious, and able to communicate with each other over enormous distances.
Until now our only response to the song of the whale has been to hunt it down, butcher it with appalling cruelty and convert it into anything from face-cream and tennis-racket strings to dog food and bicycle saddles.
