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Posted Sat Aug 28 2010: from
BBC:
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Anti-whaling NGOs warn of 'contaminated' whale meat http://apocadocs.com/s.pl?1283022062
Environmental and animal-welfare groups are urging the International Whaling Commission (IWC) to persuade the World Health Organization (WHO) to act over fears about eating whale meat.
The coalition of organisations wants the WHO to issue guidelines amid fears about the safety of the meat.
The groups say whale meat is highly contaminated with mercury and should not be eaten.
But whaling nations say they already have health guidelines in place....
They say dangerously high levels of mercury accumulate up the food chain.
Small cetaceans, like tooth whales and pilot whales, are near the top of it and therefore a lot more toxic compounds tend to accumulate in these mammals' tissues than in smaller inhabitants of the marine world, warn the NGOs....
[Faroe Island whaling defender]: "It's true that pilot whales have very high levels of mercury in the meat and PCBs in the blubber and in 1998, the relevant health authorities at the Faroes issued a safety recommendation advising people on how much it was safe to eat. And people have taken that advice on board."...
"If we don't have the whale meat and the blubber, what do we eat instead? We don't have meat production as such in the Faroes other than sheep and a limited amount of cattle that is kept mostly for milk. The sheep population is certainly not enough to serve the meat needs," [she continued]....
Though the conservationists think it is rather unlikely for the IWC to extend the whaling ban to cover the small cetaceans, many hope that getting people to think about their health will do the trick.
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[Read more stories about:
marine mammals, hunting to extinction, toxic buildup, stupid humans]
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'Doc Jim says:
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I have the right to murder an intelligent mammal, because I want to eat its toxic fat and meat. How hard is that to understand?
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