MAKE IT A SANCTUARY.

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 245, 16 October 1929, Page 6

MAKE IT A SANCTUARY.

The spectacle of a huge whaling factory ship and a flotilla of seven killing steamers, like a big, black hen and her chickens, entering Wellington harbour on a recent morning, on their way southward to the icy seas, suggested a hope that before next season comes round something will be done internationally to stop the tremendous slaughter of the Southern Ocean whales. This is only the advance guard of the commercial navy which is to scour the Antarctic seas as soon as the weather permits this summer, a navy equipped with all the most modern devices for converting the greatest creature that swims the watery world into barrels of oil. Scores of other ships and many hundreds of men will be in the midst of the onesided war a few weeks hence, and the whale tribe, one imagines, will be hard put to it to avoid extermination. It seems impossible that this campaign of greedy slaughter can last much longer on such a scale. II) is simply a race between rival organisations of liighly-capitalised companies to get in ahead of each other and kill as many whales as possible while the killing is good. The only hope for the survival of the Southern Ocean whales seems to me to lie in the setting aside of some easily-defined area as a sanctuary. Why not make the Ross Sea a sanctuary? -New Zealand has. made something of a reputation itself as a far-sighted nation by setting apart numerous islands and other places as sanctuaries for the protection of native birds and the preservation of forest glories. Could the State not make an effort to extend the field of this scientific provision for the future by proclaiming the sector of the Antarctic Sea within its jurisdiction an area within which absolutely no whale killing should be permitted? There are difficulties in the way which would have to be arranged between the British Government and the Norwegian concessionaire in the first place, but it is tolerably certain that our Government could get its way if it made a determined effort to assert its undoubted right to protect the life of the Ross Sea. That area of the Antarctic waters almost seems designed by Nature as a sanctuary. The hundreds of miles of thin ice which have to be penetrated before the clear water of the Ross Sea is reached is in its way a boundary. New Zealand has been entrusted with the administration of those parts of the great south world, and is certainly entitled to press for an arrangement which shall make its small area a region in which the sorely-pressed whale tribe shall be safe from man's merciless attack. j > q <