KEY POINTS:
Whales might swim around in the ocean doing their own thing, but the fact is they are one hell of a slippery diplomatic issue.
When documents were leaked this week revealing that high-level political appointees from Western countries - New Zealand and Australia among them - have been
thinking about allowing Japan to carry on its so-called scientific culling of the sea giants in its own backyard, thereby getting the country out of our backyard, all hell broke loose.
Greenpeace and other conservation groups say this proposal is unacceptable and there has been astonishment that New Zealand, with its proud anti-whaling and pro-conservation history, was even part of such discussions.
But even a whale expert here says this is only a proposal; that something has to be done to break a long-standing impasse which nobbles the International Whaling Commission at the knees, rendering it virtually useless.
Foreign Minister Murray McCully, in keeping with Australian Environment Minister Peter Garrett, quickly pointed out New Zealand is not supporting any particular proposal but is involved because we urgently need to find a way of reducing the number of whales being killed.
Under the proposal, led by the American chair of the IWC, William Hogarth, from the former Bush administration, Japan would be allowed to kill an unspecified number of whales off its own coast in return for cutting back the number of minke whales it slaughters each year in the Southern Ocean.
While not condoning any such idea, Auckland whale biologist Dr Rochelle Constantine says she was not at all surprised to hear of New Zealand's involvement in discussions.
For many years countries have been struggling to find common ground, looking for some way of moving forward, she says.
"I don't think it's any secret that many of the member states at the IWC have been deadlocked basically into pro-whaling and anti-whaling in the crudest sense."
At IWC meetings, Japan manages to recruit, one way or another, a number of countries who vote in its favour. We can't stay locked in this stalemate, she says, "the meeting is not worthwhile, we're making no progress".
When a moratorium on commercial whaling was put in place back in 1986 (which Japan manages to flout by claiming its whaling is for scientific reasons) it was with a view to looking at the potential for future commercial whaling again, she points out.
"You must remember that the IWC was set up (in 1946) as a whaling management convention - for the business, the industry of killing whales."
It did not start out as a conservation organisation.
"Conservation came into place when they realised that many of the great whale stocks throughout the world were seriously endangered and in some cases heading quite rapidly for extinction."
With that in mind it was agreed to stop, to assess whale stocks, to look at the state of populations throughout the world and to then, in time, move forward to see what might happen with regards to commercial whaling.
All of this takes time.
The animals are long-lived and slow-breeding and the recovery of most populations has been slow and variable.
Blue whales are still endangered, as are South Pacific humpbacks, yet the North Pacific humpbacks have recovered and are off the endangered list.
In recent years the Japanese in particular, but also the other two whaling nations, Norway and Iceland, have argued that some stocks have recovered sufficiently to cope with commercial whaling.
One such stock Japan targets is the Antarctic minke, which wasn't hunted as heavily during the main period of commercial hunting. Japan claims they are a healthy, robust population.
Science, however, says Constantine, does not necessarily agree. Surveying the Antarctic is very difficult. Numbers fluctuate wildly, not necessarily because the numbers of animals have fluctuated but because of the difficulty in accurately assessing population sizes.
The science advises extreme caution but the Japanese want to hunt - and that's the stalemate.
Wouldn't it be great to get the problem out of our backyard?
Constantine says New Zealanders need to think very seriously about that.
"Who owns the whales anyway?" she asks.
"You know, the Southern Ocean, it's quite a long way away. Even though it's our backyard it's pretty big and those whales that are there, they swim past Australia and they swim past New Zealand and they swim up through the middle of the Pacific to places like the Cook Islands and don't come anywhere near us.
"Does that make them any more or less ours than the whales around coastal Japanese waters? Are they less important to us because they're not in our backyard?"
Take the Bryde's whale, which we have in the Hauraki Gulf and is studied by Constantine and others at Auckland University.
"It's possible that those go into the Northern Hemisphere and maybe even up to Japan, there's no reason why not, and yet Japan has a scientific hunt of Bryde's whales."
What happens in a country's territorial waters is up to them, she says; that's why we have territorial waters.
"But what do you do with these large migratory species, which most species of whale are?
"You know, who do they belong to? I don't actually think they belong to anyone and I guess we need to step back and think about that."
Something has to happen, Constantine says. Where we are now is unacceptable for everyone and also for the whales. The Japanese just go on and issue themselves the scientific take more and more.
"That's not contributing to science, it's completely bogus and yet they manage to get away with it."
The so-called secret deal is not a done deal and not actually a secret either, said a source close to the IWC. What was leaked was part of various proposals due for publication within the next few days and there would be plenty of public debate in the run-up to a meeting of the IWC in Rome in March.
An "open democratic process" was always going to be the case and to speculation that any wheeling and dealing with Japan might boil down to trade-offs for trade, the source says absolutely not.
The motivation is to break through the whaling impasse which now sees the Japanese taking any number of whales they like.
Another New Zealand whale expert, Associate Professor Liz Slooten from Otago University, is puzzled at the mooting of this proposal, drawn up by diplomats but not the scientific wing of the IWC.
It makes no sense, because scientific whaling in the Southern Ocean is not likely to last beyond five or so years, she says.
Slooten, a founder and trustee of the New Zealand Whale and Dolphin Trust, says going all that way for whaling is already economically borderline. Moreover, she says the Japanese public is not all that excited about eating whale meat.
Even before the current economic downturn and the increase of fuel costs, whaling was becoming more marginal for Japan, she says.
Because the scientific reasons Japan put forward were arguable, the reason the country wanted to continue whaling were cultural or self-determination statements.
"Certainly Japan as a country is pretty loath to take advice from other nations, especially the United States," she muses.
But another reason for the stubborn stance could be a fear that if they stop whaling then other over-exploited fish stocks they love will be targeted next by the international community.
"Possibly they see it as some kind of precedence where if they say to the world 'okay then, whale meat is not that popular in Japan, whaling as an activity is very unpopular in other countries, we'll stop doing it' they may be worried then various other nations will ask them to be more cautious in their use of other species, like tuna for example, or the Patagonian toothfish, those kind of species," says Slooten.
Such a deal is unnecessary and gives away far too much, she says.
"A problem with it is that we would be shifting the whaling from whale populations in the Southern Ocean that are relatively healthy to whale populations in the north Pacific that are not doing nearly so well.
"So from a straight, biological, conservation point of view, it's not a very good deal."
