Since 1987, Japan has killed between 200 and 1,200 whales each year, saying this was to monitor stocks to establish sustainable quotas. Critics say this was just a cover so Japan could hunt whales for food, as the meat from the whales killed for research usually did end up for sale.

Whaling is the process of hunting of whales for their usable products such as meat and blubber, which can be turned into a type of oil that became increasingly important in the Industrial Revolution.

The IUCN estimates that there are over 100,000 minke whales in the wild, so it should be possible to continue hunting them without endangering the species. However, fin whales are an endangered species, and the IUCN says commercial whaling in the 19th and 20th centuries was the main cause.

The Prefectural Government, through publicly issued statements, emphasize that whale and dolphin hunting are a traditional form of livelihood in Japan, and that, like other animals, whales and dolphins are killed to supply the demand for meat.

Despite occasional reports of whales scooping people into their mouths, it’s incredibly rare—and for all but one species, swallowing a human is physically impossible. On Friday, a lobster diver made headlines when he described miraculously surviving being “swallowed” by a humpback whale off Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

In fact, there has never been a recorded case of a sperm whale or any other whale actually consuming a human. Aside from the sperm whale, the killer whale (the largest of the dolphin species) also possesses the ability to consume humans, since they have teeth designed for tearing apart the flesh of mammals.

Swallowed alive, man survives inside whale’s stomach for three days.

The moral of the story of Jonah and the big fish, sometimes referred to as a whale, is that a person cannot run away from God’s plans.

The primary theme in Jonah is that God’s compassion is boundless, not limited just to “us” but also available for “them.” This is clear from the flow of the story and its conclusion: (1) Jonah is the object of God’s compassion throughout the book, and the pagan sailors and pagan Ninevites are also the benefactors of …

Another of those lessons that we really are glad to learn is that no man can sink so low as to be beyond forgiveness. As a prophet of God, Jonah had sunk about as low as he could, but God would still forgive him. Nineveh was wicked enough that God intended to destroy it, but He could still forgive them.