Bjorn Andersen killed 111 minke whales this season. He tells us how he does it, why he does it, and what he thinks would happen if whale-hunting ever stopped. (This bonus episode is a follow-up to our series “Everything You Never Knew About Whaling.")
Hey there, it's Stephen Dubner.
If you are a regular listener, you may have just heard our series called everything you never knew about whaling.
We spoke with economists, historians, a Moby Dick scholar, and an environmental activist whose mission in life is to stop whale hunting.
We also tried to speak with a whale hunter, but public sentiment against whale hunting is so strong that most modern whalers don't want to speak with the press.
Also, there just aren't that many whalers around anymore.
In the 1960s, at the peak of industrial whale hunting, thousands of whalers in more than a dozen countries were killing tens of thousands of whales a year.
Today, commercial whaling happens in only three countries, Norway, Iceland, and Japan.
And collectively they only kill around 1000 whales a year.
There just isnt much demand for whale meat, it turns out, and even less for whale oil.
Anyway, we couldnt get a modern whaler to go on the record with us until just recently after wed completed our series.
His name is Bjorn Anderson and hes one of the biggest whalers in Norway.
The norwegian government allows for the harvest of 1000 mynca whales a year.
The minka is plentiful.
Its not at all an endangered species.
Even so, Anderson and his fellow whalers usually take only around half of the allowed quota each year.
Like I said, not much demand for whale meat these days.
When we caught up with Anderson, he had just finished his whaling season.
In the conversation you're about to hear, he tells us why he loves hunting whales and how he does it, why harvesting whales is important to maintaining the supply of fish, and why he thinks that in the future there will be more whale hunting and not less.
That's coming up on today's bonus episode of Freakonomics Radio, starting now.
This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything, with your host, Stephen Dubner.