When it comes to commercial whaling, things are rarely as simple as they seem. The fact that it continues, 30 years after the International Whaling Commission (IWC) voted for an indefinite moratorium, suggests that there has been some kind of failure on the part of environmentalists and other opponents of whaling; yet the number of whales being killed by whalers today is a fraction of what it was three decades ago, and a barely noticeable blip when set against the size of the industry at its peak. And although the whaling nations’ self-assigned quotas may be higher than they were a few years ago, the actual catches fall some way short of those quotas.