viser to the Government in matters pertaining to marine mammals. This is suggested by paragraph (5) of section 202(a) in S. 3112 wherein the Commission will make specific recommendations to the Secretary of State concerning international conservation efforts. This is as it should be, in my opinion.

However, I think one more step is in order. The Commission ought to participate in the international efforts to implement its own recommendations. This, of course, would require that some members be a part of the American delegation to several international control organizations such as the International Whaling Commission.

I am not suggesting that the Marine Mammal Commission participate in a substantive manner in such international organizations, for that I believe might be an usurpation of the rights and duty of the State Department.

I am suggesting that the Marine Mammal Commission participate in all such meetings in an advisory capacity. This would allow the Commission to observe how its recommendations fare at the hands foreigners. It would allow the Commission to review more closely the American policy, which is one of its tasks.

And attendance at international meetings would permit it to carry out its major task more effectively; namely, making policy recommendations at the very moment they are needed rather than at a subsequent date by means of memorandums that too often are too late.

In short, I respectfully request that consideration be given to the possibility of making it mandatory for one member of the Marine Mammal Commission and/or one member of the Committee of Scientific Advisers to attend the annual meeting of all international regulatory agencies concerned with marine mammals of which the United States is a member, and that they attend as advisers to the American delegation.

Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

May I ask one question?

Senator HOLLINGS. Certainly.

Dr. SMALL. I would like to add a few comments here which were prompted by the statements of the three previous witnesses. This concerns management and moratorium.

Senator HOLLINGS. I would like to have your observations on that. I am trying to learn myself. What are your feelings about that? Dr. SMALL. I have several-I have a lot of feelings about it, believe me, sir. I spent 4 years of my life studying what happened to the whales in the Antarctic at the hands of the International Whaling Commission and in my opinion the word "management" is a boobytrap word. There are very few managers in existence who can control and manage properly a species of animal. The human race has great difficulties managing itself and we are members of the human race. There are very few good examples of sound management. There are two I can think of.

I think the best example is the ways in which the Norwegian Government controls and manages its offshore fisheries, and despite the fact that that Norwegian Government hires the best specialists and is more than willing to take any necessary action to protect

those fisheries and maintain them and develop them for many years now, the yields have been declining. The herring is declining quite rapidly and they simply don't know why. I think it would be very difficult to find a better managed and better controlled stock of any animal in the world.

The Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Commission, in the grand banks off Cape Cod extending up to Nova Scotia, manages those fisheries that have been used 400 years now and I think the Commission is composed of about 14 member nations. There are scientists who attend from all those nations the annual meetings. That is a multi-million-dollar industry. Still, despite the so-called management, and despite the scientific knowledge that goes into it we are perplexed as to why the haddock have declined so drastically. I think the catch declined 90 percent in 10 years. The lobster are fast disappearing and we simply don't know why. I have not the slightest objection to a moratorium. In fact I support it. I support it for all the large whales of the world, the blue, fin, sperm, because they have been drastically reduced, several of them to the point of extinction.

If you impose a moratorium on a given species, I will admit that you momentarily inconvenience the fishermen or whalers who are engaged in harvesting them. However, in many cases most of them are very large corporations and they have other sources of income. They can be given tax advantages. However when you consider the advantages of a moratorium I think they far outweigh the disadvantages. What happens, for example, if you declare a moratorium-let me just state for a moment what has happened in many commissions. You have a situation where you have scientific advisors and some modicum of management. They say, "Well, let's not cut down, let's keep studying," and the stocks go down and down and down. This happened in the International Whaling Commission repeatedly, I repeat, repeatedly, and they did not stop until they couldn't find another whale. So let's assume you put on a moratorium, one of three things will happen: The population of the animal in question will go down, it will stay the same, or go up. Simple logic.

If it goes down you can be reasonably certain that if man had added his killing to the natural process the population would have been reduced even more. If it stays the same you simply don't know why, and probably the sustainable yield would have been zero

anyway.

As usually happens, as you would expect from a moratorium, the population would increase. In this case it seems so you have lost nothing. You have gained time to study the species. You have allowed the stock to increase in size. You will probably get a higher sustainable yield when you resume hunting and above all you will have made absolutely certain there will be no permanent damage to the stock.

I am very much concerned with the whales of the high seas because the population of the world is rising and we have within the last 10 years rendered two valuable species virtually extinct. We have two more on the way down. We can't make people see daylight on this. There is only one way to stop that and that is to stop.

Excuse me if I raise my voice, it is only because I—

Senator HOLLINGS. That is the logic of it. You stop where you are. In other words, with the haddock dropping 90 percent in 10 years, you don't need some grown, mature person necessarily to reason that out.

Dr. SMALL. No, sir.

Senator HOLLINGS. The thing to do is stop where you are and study it from that standpoint.

Dr. SMALL. That is right.

Senator HOLLINGS. We are rapidly going out of business in the marine mammal field.

Dr. SMALL. That is right.

Senator HOLLINGS. Yet we have all the management and scientific devices.

Dr. SMALL. In most of those cases people use the world "management" in reference to themselves and it sounds pretty good. But I have talked to many members of commissions involved with whales of the world and they admit in private that their commission has been a complete failure. But they can't convince the whaling industry or the governments or what-not to call a halt. They call a halt when there aren't any more and damn it that is too late. You thereby deprive millions of people in the future a proper food supply. If the animal becomes extinct it is gone forever. As the world population rises we will need more food and not less. There is only one way the stocks can increase, that is, until we know what we are doing, stop and let them increase and find out.

Senator HOLLINGS. This is an excellent statement, Dr. Small. Our committee is very appreciative of your appearance here. The secret sessions of the International Whaling Commission, they meet in executive session? They don't welcome anyone? It is an off the record session?

Dr. SMALL. What usually happens-what has happened up until the present is that the meetings take place once a year, Washington, London, Oslo, Capetown, Tokyo, Moscow, and the sessions usually last a week to 2 weeks, but as in the the first session some local diplomat or politician will come and make a speech welcoming the delegates and when the speech is over and he leaves, the elected chairman of the commission asks the members of the press to leave and they must leave and there are no outsiders allowed in. On rare occasions members or speakers from conservation organizations are allowed to attend as observers. Sometimes the observers are allowed to speak at the end of the last session to see if they have any questions after all the decisions have been made. No one knows what the debates are all about. The press is excluded.

The verbatim accounts are in the foreign offices of the member nations. It is very difficult to find out what has happened. Naturally the members of the press won't go to the various capitals to dig through the files and consequently the whole world doesn't know what is going on. I think it is a disgraceful situation.

I am not upset I can't go because that usually involves traveling several thousand miles and it is expensive but I think members of the press should be allowed to attend.

Right now there are only two whaling pelagic nations, Soviet Union and Japan, and to the extent the world is ignorant of what goes on they can go on without any criticism at all.

Senator HOLLINGS. I understand, sir, and I think this is a very, very valuable suggestion you made here. You are not going to change the Japanese Government, I can tell you.

Dr. SMALL. I know that.

Senator HOLLINGS. The Government is the bank and the bank is the business, and the business is the Government, and it is completely different from our system. It is interlocking. They intended it as such and that is the case with all commerce and industry in Japan. I think some pressures ough to be brought to bear.

Dr. SMALL. I do, too. I have been perturbed somewhat about the unwillingness, let us say, of the State Department people to rock the boat a little bit and to needle them to change some of their ways. I simply don't understand it. I don't understand why no one, Norwegian, or British or whoever, why no one objected to the Japanese commissioner when he is an employee of the whalers. That I have never understood.

I don't know who represents the American Government at the disarmament conventions or meetings but I am reasonably certain they are not armament manufacturers. And for the Japanese to send a whaler to the organization that is supposed to rationally regulate the whaling industry-that is slightly demented if you ask me but no one has ever criticized it.

Senator HOLLINGS. All right, sir, thank you very, very much. We appreciate your appearance this afternon.

The next witness is Mr. Joseph Poser of the Fur Conservation Institute.

STATEMENT OF JOSEPH E. POSER, FUR CONSERVATION INSTITUTE; ACCOMPANIED BY JAMES R. SHARP, WASHINGTON COUNSEL; AND WALTER SCHWARTZ, FUR CONSERVATION INSTITUTE OF AMERICA

Mr. POSER. Mr. Chairman, I am Joseph E. Poser. I have with me Mr. James R. Sharp, our Washington attorney, and Mr. Walter Schwartz, also of the Fur Conservation Institute of America. Senator HOLLINGS. Good. Welcome to all of you.

Mr. POSER. I am a New York fur merchant, president of the American Fur Brokers Association and a vice president of the American Fur Merchants' Association. However, I speak here on behalf of the Fur Conservation Institute of America, a body represening all segments of the fur industry in the United States.

Contrary to impressions the members of this subcommittee may well have gathered from the highly emotional and either purposely warped or sadly misinformed presentation made before this committee and before the House committee by some proponents of some of the Ocean Mammal Protection Act, the U.S. fur industry is devoted to the concept of conservation of fur bearing animals.

Since primitive times when furs served to shelter man from the elements, fur trading has had an honorable history in this country and around the world. For centuries fur bearing animals

were plentiful and there was no concern with the question of continuity of supply. Vast lands existed, unoccupied by man, where fur bearing animals lived in abundant numbers, and the early traders took what they wanted without endangering any species.

In those years the necessity of conservation did not guide actions of the fur industry or of government officials or of the general public. Early in the 20th century the necessity of conservation of our wild mammal resources first became evident when it was found that the North Pacific fur seal population had been reduced to a dangerous level. In 1911, with the support and encouragement of the fur industries in the four countries harvesting North Pacific fur seals, the United States, Canada, Russia, and Japan, signed a North Pacific Fur Seal Convention. This was one of the first and a prime example of a plan for the rational use of a natural resource. This convention, may I point out, was adopted by governments with the support of the fur industry long before its present opponents had any thought of the necessity for wildlife conservation. It was highly successful and in 1957 a new convention for the conservation of fur seals was again agreed to by the four countries, as before, with the warm support of the fur industries of those countries. It is this latter convention which expires in 1976.

I want to emphasize this example of fur trade participation in early conservation programs because in recent years and even today we have been used as a convenient whipping boy both by some conservation organizations and by the more extreme humane societies. With aggressive arrogance and the presumption of their own moral purity, they repeat ad nauseam accusations of greed, cruelty, and the favored word, exploitation. The record of our U.S. fur industry shows this to be a complete fabrication. Nevertheless, they have aroused public opinion against an evil genie of their own conjuring and then proposed extreme legislation to put him back in his bottle. Such extreme legislation is not in the interests of conservation and is unrealistic in its aim. Conservation must be international to be effective the cooperation of other countries is essential if our own conservation measures are to work, but other nations are not likely to be induced to sign excessively and unnecessarily strict agreements.

Everyone concerned with these hearings, including the fur industry, knows that the spread of the world population over much of the face of the earth has resulted in the impairment of the natural habitat of wild animals. We have learned that man's need of living space, space in which to build homes, produce his needs and to enjoy his recreational activities, has grown beyond the wildest predictions of the past.

The public and we in the fur industry have also learned that the development and worldwide use of pesticides has added an unanticipated danger to the continued existence of wild animal stocks. Our industry and the public now recognize that wide scale pollution of streams, land, and atmosphere has threatened not only the lives and livelihood of the people who occupy our ever more crowded earth, but, as well, have threatened the lives of many wild animals which historically have provided man with great recreational, educational and economic resources. For all these reasons we in the