The last time I hunted whale was in the village of Lamalera, on the island of Lembata, in Nusa Tenggara, eastern Indonesia....The villagers of Lamalera, a community of about 1500 people, have been hunting whales using the same traditional methods - throwing harpoons from small boats powered by muscle and woven sail - for hundreds of years. They only catch a handful (quite a handful I imagine) of whales a year and, perhaps fortunately, none on the days I was in the village.

(Commercial whaling is banned throughout much of the world, but subsistence whaling is permitted by International Whaling Commission regulations in certain indigenous communities).