Commercial whaling continues in Japan, Norway, and Iceland despite international opposition, with the welfare of killed animals a major ethical concern given the difficulty of humanely killing large cetaceans at sea.
Commercial whaling welfare is characterized by the extraordinary difficulty of humanely killing an animal the size of a whale in open ocean conditions. Penthrite grenade harpoons are designed to cause immediate death through brain destruction but frequently fail to achieve rapid insensibility - non-lethal strikes that require secondary killing methods are documented in whaling records. A whale that survives the initial harpoon strike may swim rapidly while tethered to the vessel, experiencing severe pain and exhaustion before either breaking free (and potentially dying slowly from wounds) or being killed with secondary methods. The welfare case against commercial whaling is therefore not just about conservation but about the fundamental impossibility of reliably humanely killing these animals in commercial conditions.