Whale poaching

Though Ulsan is known for it’s whale restuarants, and it’s whale festival, I’m proud to report that the police are also punishing whale poachers. Though Korea is traditionally a whaling nation, with evidence of this dating back thousands of years in the Bandugae petroglyphs, these days they are playing smart. Ulsan hosted the international whaling commision in 2004, but when the Japanese headed a movement to lift the ban on whaling, the Koreans, wisely, abstained from the vote. There was quite a lot of local pressure to vote with the Japanese, but the government was smart enough to let Japan be the badguy and take all the bad press.

I hope that the local authorities continue to go after these poachers, but the prize is tempting. According to a KBS report, a single whale is worth about $40 000 in meat. As you can imagine, that must be a very tempting prize as local fishing stocks continue to diminish.