JOYCE – A group of whaling opponents says the federal agency that conducted a probe into an unauthorized Sept. 8 whale hunt has close ties to the Makah tribe whose members it investigated.
The National Marine Fisheries Service, a division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, has conflicts of interest that are “almost incestuous,” in the words of Chuck Owens of Joyce.
Fisheries Service also is overseeing the federal court-ordered environmental impact statement on the tribe’s request to resume authorized whaling.
Owens said he wants an FBI investigation of the relationships.
He said he would spread his campaign across the country with the help of a national animal advocacy group.
Owens founded Peninsula Citizens for the Protection of Whales, which has opposed the tribe’s hunting gray whales off the Washington Coast and in the Strait of Juan de Fuca since the 1990s.
“We don’t trust NMFS,” he told Peninsula Daily News.
“They’ve never given us a reason to trust them.”
The Makah preserved their whale-hunting rights in the 1855 Treaty of Neah Bay and legally killed a 30-foot female gray whale off the Washington state coast in 1999.
Enjoined from more hunts by a federal appeals court, the Makah have sought an exemption from the Marine Mammal Protection Act that NMFS enforces.
Last month, however, five tribal members harpooned, shot and killed a gray whale in the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and Fisheries Service investigated the unauthorized action.
