Hey there, it's Stephen Dovner. If you are a regular listener, you may have just heard

our series called Everything You Never New About Whaling. We spoke with economists, historians,

a mobi dick scholar, and an environmental activist whose mission in life is to stop

whale hunting. We also tried to speak with a whale hunter, but

public sentiment against whale hunting is so strong that most modern whalers don't want

to speak with the press. Also, there just aren't that many whalers around anymore. In the

1960s, at the peak of industrial whale hunting, thousands of whalers in more than a dozen

countries were killing tens of thousands of whales a year. Today, commercial whaling

happens in only three countries, Norway, Iceland, and Japan. And collectively, they only

kill around a thousand whales a year. There just isn't much demand for whale meat. It

turns out, and even less for whale oil. Anyway, we couldn't get a modern whaler to go

on the record with us until, just recently, after we'd completed our series. His name

is Bjorn Anderson, and he's one of the biggest whalers in Norway. The Norwegian government

allows for the harvest of 1,000 minka whales a year. The minka is plentiful. It's not

at all an endangered species. Even so, Anderson and his fellow whalers usually take only

around half of the allowed quota each year. Like I said, not much demand for whale meat

these days. When we caught up with Anderson, he had just finished his whaling season. In

the conversation you're about to hear, he tells us why he loves hunting whales and how

he does it. Why harvesting whales is important to maintaining the supply of fish, and why

he thinks it in the future, there will be more whale hunting and not less. That's coming

up on today's bonus episode of Freakonomics Radio, starting now.

This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything, with

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