NEAH BAY — The Makah Tribal Council has denounced the killing of a California gray whale, calling it “a blatant violation of our law” and promising to prosecute those responsible.
“We are a law-abiding people, and we will not tolerate lawless conduct by any of our members,” the council said in a statement released Sunday. “We hope the public does not permit the actions of five irresponsible persons to be used to harm the image of the entire Makah tribe.”
The U.S. Coast Guard detained five men believed to have killed the whale on Saturday, then turned them over to tribal police for further questioning.
In its statement, the council said the men, whose names it did not release, were booked into the tribe’s detention facility and released after posting bail. The council said the men will stand trial in tribal court, but did not set a date.
The Makah tribe’s treaty rights to hunt whales have been tangled in the courts for several years.
The federal government removed the gray whale from the endangered species list in 1994. Five years later, with a permit from the National Marine Fisheries Service, Makah tribal members killed their first whale in more than 70 years.
Animal welfare activists sued, leading to a court order that the tribe must obtain a waiver under the Marine Mammal Protection Act to continue its whale hunts.
John McCarty, a former tribal whaling commission member who has been an advocate of the Makah’s right to resume whaling, said the tribe had been working to obtain the waiver and that the process was close to completion.
“I don’t know why they did this. It’s terrible,” McCarty told a Seattle newspaper. “I think the anti-whalers will be after us in full force, and we look ridiculous. Like we can’t manage our own people, we can’t manage our own whale.”
Criminal prosecution under the federal Marine Mammal Protection Act is rare, said Brian Gorman, a spokesman for the National Marine Fisheries Service. “While it remains an option, I think we have to finish our investigation before we make any kind of call like that,” Gorman told The Associated Press on Sunday.
Gorman confirmed that the fisheries service was nearing a decision on the tribe’s waiver request. “The general feeling was that we were getting toward the end of a fairly long road and that our decision about whether or not to grant a waiver would be made fairly soon,” Gorman said.
Gorman said he does not believe the killing of the whale will affect the tribe’s waiver application.
The whale was harpooned by 9:30 a.m. Saturday a few miles east of Neah Bay and that five men on two small boats, witnesses said.
The whale was headed toward the Pacific Ocean after being wounded and disappeared beneath the surface around 7:15 p.m., dragging down buoys that had been attached to a harpoon. A biologist for the tribe declared the animal dead, Petty Officer Shawn Eggert said.
On Sunday, the Humane Society of the United States and its international arm called the killing “extremely disturbing, not only because this is a flagrant violation of federal law but also due to the inhumaneness of the hunt and the amount of suffering the whale had to endure.”
The group urged the government to halt its consideration of the Makah’s waiver request until a full investigation of the killing is complete.
Mark Oswell, a fisheries service spokesman, told the Peninsula Daily News that investigators are looking into whether the whale was killed because it had gotten entangled in a fishing net and couldn’t be cut loose.
However, Coast Guard Petty Officer David Marin said his agency had no information indicating the whale had gotten trapped in netting before it was shot.
Ed Claplanhoo, a Makah tribal elder and member of the tribal whaling commission, said he’s concerned the killing will hurt the tribe’s efforts to exercise its treaty rights to hunt whales.
“We need to salvage this situation so we can exercise our treaty right in future years,” Claplanhoo said. “We have some fence-mending to do now to bring that about.”
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