NEAH BAY – Makah tribal leaders promised Sunday to prosecute the five men “who took it on themselves to hunt a whale” a day earlier.
The 30-foot gray whale was pronounced dead at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, about 10 hours after it had been harpooned and shot with a high-powered rifle.
It sank in 500-foot-deep water in the Strait of Juan de Fuca about a mile east of Cape Flattery and two miles south of the Canadian border.
The five – Theron Parker, Andy Noel, Billy Secor, Frank Gonzales Jr. and Wayne Johnson – had talked days earlier about killing a whale, Tribal Chairman Ben Johnson Jr. said on Sunday.
“They talked about it,” Ben Johnson said.
“I don’t know if there was any plan or not. It was days before.”
Parker, Johnson and Noel were participants in the Makah’s successful and federally sanctioned whale hunt on May 17, 1999, during which a whale was harpooned and then quickly killed with a large-caliber rifle. That was the tribe’s first whale hunt in 70 years.
So far the five men – who were arrested by the U.S. Coast Guard but turned over to tribal police – face only tribal charges.
The men could face civil penalties of up to $20,000 each under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, National Marine Fisheries Service spokesman Brian Gorman said.
Criminal prosecution under the act is almost unheard-of, but some environmentalists said the federal government should get tough on the whalers.
The tribal chairman said the hunters were exercising what the Makah regard as a right granted by an 1855 treaty with the United States.
